The Geek Rock Series
by Viola
Summary: John Byers has one hell of a midlife crisis, complete with fast cars, fast women, action adventure, leather pants and a doomed affair with a hot blonde or two. AU after 'Tango de los Pistoleros'.
1. Prologue: Susanne

Title: **The Geek Rock Series**  
Fandom: The Lone Gunmen  
Summary: John Byers has one hell of a mid-life crisis, complete with fast cars, fast women, action/adventure, leather pants and a doomed affair with a hot blonde (or two). (AU after _Tango de los Pistoleros_)  
Rating: PG-13(ish)  
Characters/Pairing(s): Byers/Susanne, Jimmy/Yves, Byers/OC(s), subtext-y hints of Jimmy/Byers and vaguely humorous references to Langly/Frohike

**Prologue: Susanne**

_Susanne, you're all that I wanted of a girl_

_you're all that I need in the world_

_I'm your child, make me blush, drive me wild_

_Susanne, you're all that I wanted_

September 9, 2001

She was waiting in the bar when he arrived. The place was understated, intimate, done in primary reds and blues. The windows were shuttered against the bright afternoon sun, leaving the place only dimly lit by tabletop oil lamps and strategically-placed light fixtures. It was still early, only around three o'clock, and she and the bartender were the only people there.

"We've got to stop meeting like this," he said, taking a seat beside her at the bar and giving her a slightly sheepish smile.

"Still think that's funny, do you?" She took a sip of her drink, taking care not to look directly at him.

"I've never had much of a sense of humor."

"I think you sell yourself short." She signaled the bartender. "A scotch, please. Neat. And another of the same for me."

While the bartender busied himself making their drinks, she finally turned, leaning into him. Her knee bumped against his. "Hello, John."

"Hello, Susanne."

"Nice suit."

His scotch arrived and he took a long drink. "It's the same as all the others."

She laughed softly. "Maybe that's what's nice about it."

He finished his drink in a second swallow and stood.

"Meet me upstairs in an hour?" He slid the keycard to his room toward her across the bar. The bartender pretended not to notice with studied ease. Susanne put her hand over his as she took the key.

"I'll see you then."

* * *

He hadn't planned anything especially romantic. Planning ahead was a luxury they mostly didn't have, thanks to the secret codes and shifting itineraries they had to use to make these meetings even possible. As it was, they saw each other twice a year. Three times if they were especially lucky. Byers had a secret suspicion that fact bothered him more than it bothered Susanne, but that wasn't anything new, either. As it was they took what they could get.

When he made it upstairs to the suite, though, a bottle of champagne and two glasses were waiting for him. A single rose lay across one pillow, flanked by brightly-wrapped chocolates and a note thanking "Mr. and Mrs. Bledsoe" for choosing to stay with the Benjamin Hotel.

He took off his jacket, loosened his tie and went to find someone to get ice for the champagne. Susanne was there when he got back, standing in the middle of the room, her hands at her sides, looking slightly lost. Her face brightened a little when she saw him in the doorway.

"You picked quite the hotel," she said, as he closed the door behind him and shot the deadbolt home.

"Well, it's better than the last one, at any rate," he said.

She smiled slightly, the corners of her mouth just barely turning up. "The Comfort Inn in Missoula?"

"Chinese take-out and a six-pack of Sam Adams."

"That was really, truly horrible Chinese food. I still don't know what was in the fried rice, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to." She sat down on the bed. "Champagne and chocolate is definitely an improvement."

"The restaurant offers twenty-four hour room service. No moo-shoo pork this time, I promise." He stuck the champagne into the ice bucket and went to sit beside her.

She took her shoes off, tucking her feet up and leaning against his shoulder. "I would kill for some decent sushi. It's been years." She laced her fingers with his. "But there's time for that later."

"Much later," he said and kissed her softly.

"This is lovely," she said, leaning her forehead against his. "You shouldn't have, though. It's too extravagant, and too risky."

It was true; the Benjamin wasn't exactly low-profile. It was expensive, exclusive, and Manhattan was practically crawling with tourists this time of year. The two of them were hiding right in plain sight, thanks to one of Jimmy's occasional moments of accidental genius -- and one of his platinum cards.

"But I wanted to." He took her hand. "It's been two and a half years, after all."

"Has it already? What an odd anniversary to celebrate."

"It's the only one we've got."

She went over and picked up the complimentary bottle of champagne, scrutinizing it for a moment before she finally said, "All right." She popped the cork. It echoed around the room like a gunshot. "Let's celebrate then."

She poured two glasses and offered him one. He had to cross the room to reach her outstretched hand, and he caught their reflections in the large mirror on the far wall. He almost didn't recognize himself. He took the glass from her and moved in closer, letting his free hand fall to her waist.

She kissed him then, hard, one hand heavy on the back of his neck and the other holding her glass against her chest. When she pulled away, she toasted him. "Here's to the day I died."

* * *

Two days later, she was gone and he was alone again, waiting patiently for his 10:15 flight out of LaGuardia. At 9:03, he looked up from his cup of overpriced faux-Starbucks coffee and saw the CNN Airport News screen go red and insistent with a breaking news alert.

He recognized the building immediately, pouring smoke high above the skyline. People around him rushed futilely to the airport's windows. He stood up and walked toward the t.v., his coffee forgotten, his laptop pinging notifications of incoming emails in the few minutes before his wireless connection overloaded and went down.

The second plane hit the towers while he was standing there, helpless, and for a moment it was like watching his own death. His potential death, the unrealized one, the closest of all his close shaves, played out on television and turned him into a spectator.

All he could think, once he could think again, was that he had predicted this. They -- the ceaseless, tireless Them he'd spent most of his adult life working against -- had predicted this. They'd known it was coming and been powerless, or at least done nothing, to stop it. It felt like a final puzzle piece fitting into place, a nail in a coffin. Later, of course, he would question that assumption: What did They know, and when did They know it? But in that moment, watching flame and shadows and toxic dust blossom across the terminal's six tandem television screens, it felt like the one big truth he could count on, the only solid fact in the world.


	2. Flagpole Sitta

Title: **The Geek Rock Series**  
Fandom: The Lone Gunmen  
Summary: John Byers has one hell of a mid-life crisis, complete with fast cars, fast women, action/adventure, leather pants and a doomed affair with a hot blonde (or two). (AU after _Tango de los Pistoleros_)  
Rating: PG-13(ish)  
Characters/Pairing(s): Byers/Susanne, Jimmy/Yves, Byers/OC(s), subtext-y hints of Jimmy/Byers and vaguely humorous references to Langly/Frohike

Notes: Since this is AU, I've taken take some vague liberties with Yves' backstory. It's not really like they explained it much to begin with.

**1. Flagpole Sitta **

Summary: "I wanna publish zines and rage against machines."

_I wanna publish zines  
and rage against machines  
paranoia paranoia  
everybody's coming to get me  
just say you never met me  
I'm going underground with the moles _

It was a nearly universal truth that at any given time in the nation's capital someone, somewhere, was lurking in a parking garage.

It wasn't the first time Byers had been that guy, and wasn't likely to be the last. That night, he even wore a trench coat for the occasion. Of course, it was late March and drizzling sluggishly, which at least partially explained the coat. He was waiting in a moodily-lit parking structure on the District side of the 14th Street Bridge, carrying a cheap attache case and looking for all the world like a minor player in the film adaption of a Tom Clancy novel.

He checked his watch for the third time in as many minutes, and looked up suddenly at the sound of a soft footfall.

"I heard you were looking for me," Yves said, emerging from the shadows between two parked SUVs.

"That's right," he said, deciding not to ask which of his methods had been successful at reaching her. He didn't want to antagonize her -- yet.

"I suppose you know how foolhardy that is?"

He sighed. "What's with the cloak and dagger act, Yves? You used to just drop by whenever you felt like it."

"I got sloppy. It was a mistake."

She looked tired and drawn, thinner than he remembered. The last year had taken some kind of toll on her. He looked a little too long, searching for answers. She noticed, shifting uncomfortably and taking a small step back toward the shadows.

"Well?" she said, trying to sound brisk, businesslike. In reality, it just came out irritated, almost petulant.

"I need your help," he said.

"And that would be new how, exactly?"

"Well, you haven't been around lately to ask, for one thing."

She took a breath, as though trying to gather her patience. "What's the job?"

"I need you to find someone."

Yves shook her head, and turned slightly as though she was about to leave. "Use a phone book."

He reached out a hand and, none too gently, stopped her. She looked down at his hand on her arm, then up at his face, a little shocked. "You know better, Yves," he said. "This isn't some joke, some easy job. I went to the trouble of finding you for a reason."

"I see some things have changed since I left." She pulled her arm out of his grasp. "Fine. Who do you need me to find?"

"A woman named Susanne Modeski -- though you won't find her under that name. She was last seen in Manhattan last September."

"Last September?" Yves asked, starting to look suspicious. "Which _day_ last September?"

"The 11th."

"Oh, fabulous." She folded her arms across her chest, turning away from him and exhaling sharply. "Guess what, Byers? Mystery solved. I think I might know what happened to her..."

"It isn't what you think. She wasn't in Lower Manhattan. I was with her that day. She was flying out later that morning. I don't know whether she ever made it."

"All right. I'm listening..."

"I need someone with connections, someone with experience at this sort of thing. Most importantly, someone who can be discreet." He paused. "I can't pay you, of course, but I hope you'll at least consider helping. You're my last resort."

One eyebrow quirked up, a standard Yves response. It made him realize that he'd actually missed her presence, in some curious way. "If you found me," she said, "something that's no easy feat, let me assure you -- why don't you just go look for her yourself? Then money wouldn't be an issue at all."

"I think-" He hesitated. "I think maybe I'm afraid to know. I think I might not do everything required to find the truth."

Something that almost looked like sympathy crossed Yves' face, but was just as quickly gone again. "And you were counting on what? My heart of gold?"

"There's always blackmail, of course," he said mildly, "but I hope it won't come to that."

She actually laughed at him. "Whatever it is you think you know about me, I can almost assure you that it isn't the actual truth."

"You might be surprised," he said, but it was mostly a bluff. None of what he knew about her was concrete. He'd been able to discover enough hints to scare her a little, maybe, but then he'd never had a particularly good poker face.

"There's no need for that," she said, relenting. "I'll see what I can do -- just this once, as repayment for past favors. I'm not promising much, though. No one knows about this but the two of us, understand? _No one_."

"Fine. Agreed." He dug a thick file of out his bag and handed it over. "Here's everything I've been able to find out so far. As far as I can tell, she wasn't on any of the flights used in the attack. I've accounted for all the passengers who fit her description. It's always possible that she was on foot that day, I suppose, but that doesn't match what she told me before I left for LaGuardia."

"What did she tell you?"

"That she was catching a morning flight, probably around the same time as mine. I assume, though, that she was leaving from a different airport. Possibly even going somewhere by train first. I have no idea what her final destination was."

"So, it's highly unlikely that she was hurt or killed, albeit not entirely impossible." She studied him for a moment. "Or am I wrong?"

"No, you're right. The likelihood is that she's still alive."

"And yet that doesn't seem to make you happy." It wasn't quite a question.

"If she's alive..." he said. "If she's alive and free, then why hasn't she contacted me? It's been almost seven months."

Yves gave him a look that seemed to say she knew exactly why someone might want to disappear that way, but she pressed her lips together and kept silent.

"It's a distinct possibility that she was detained by the authorities," he continued. "That's where I would start, if it were me."

The eyebrow arched up again. "But it isn't you." She slid his papers into a leather satchel slung across one shoulder. "Out of curiosity, how did you find me?"

He might not have been a good bluffer, but that didn't mean he was about to show his hand. "It wasn't easy. I had to call in a few favors -- not all of them mine."

"How is-" she hesitated, "everybody?" When he didn't reply, she added, "Go ahead and lie to me, John. That's really what I want to hear, anyway."

"All right then. They're fine. Everyone's fine."

She nodded once, briskly, and then back to business, "I'll contact you when I find something. In the meantime, don't try to contact me this way again. It could be dangerous, for both of us."

"How am I supposed to-"

"You aren't, for now. I'll let you know when and where to meet me, and we'll come up with a better system then, depending on what I find."

"All right, Yves," he said, seeing that this was the best he was going to get from her. "I'll wait to hear from you."

* * *

In the aftermath of the attacks, U.S. Airways had put them all up at the Airport Sheraton near LaGuardia. The Sheraton opened up their kitchens, providing free coffee and food round the clock to all the stranded travelers. Nobody really ate much, though. The hotel was packed, the staff setting up cots in the lobby for the overflow. No one who needed a place to sleep was turned away that first night.

He'd wound up sharing his room with a pharmaceutical rep from Atlanta and a pair of college students from Maine. There were two queen beds and the sleeper sofa pulled out into a double, so they flipped a coin to see which one of them would have to share. Not that any of them actually slept. They brought coffee up to the room and sat in front of the t.v. for most of the night, the light flickering unevenly across their faces as the sun rose.

Communications were spotty for days, even weeks, afterward, but on the 12th he'd managed to log onto his email long enough to reply to Langly and Frohike to let them know that he was all right. They thought he was in Philadelphia visiting an old college friend, something he felt vaguely guilty about under the circumstances. He promised himself he'd tell them the truth when he got back.

While the connection was still there, weak and anemic as it was, he let each of his hotel roommates email their loved ones from his machine. He hadn't let another living soul, who wasn't Langly or Frohike, touch his computer in more than ten years.

That afternoon his cellphone rang, sounding incredibly, unnaturally loud and breaking the steady background rhythm of CNN's anchors speaking in hushed and serious tones. He reached for it, half-expecting (or maybe hoping) that it was Susanne. It wasn't; it was his ex-wife.

"John? John, it's Meg." Her voice sounded strained, a little hoarse, as though maybe she'd been crying. She wouldn't have been the only one. "I'm so glad you're all right! Where are you?"

"New York," he replied, wondering vaguely why he was telling her the truth.

Meg had been his college girlfriend, his first real love, his first real broken heart. Of course, eventually, he'd broken hers in return, so he guessed they were even. He hadn't heard from her in at least two years.

"It's stupid, I know," she said, "but I've been calling everyone: Mom, Dad, my sister, Penny from college. Just to see whether they're okay."

"That's not stupid. It's not stupid at all."

He sat down on the edge of the bed, and the others shifted slightly away from him, concentrating more intently on the t.v., giving him space.

"I'm glad you're all right," she said again, then lapsed into silence as though unsure what to say next.

"It's good to hear from you," he said, because it was. "I'm glad you called."

"Why are you in New York?"

"Visiting a friend." It wasn't exactly a lie. Not really the truth, either, but not a lie.

"Did you see...?"

"No. I was at the airport. We saw it on t.v." He paused. "Are you all right? Is everything...?"

"I'm fine," she said. "They keep acting like we're lucky here... by comparison, I guess. I've been avoiding Arlington. It's not like anyone is moving around much right now, anyway. I'm not even sure whether the Metro is running again yet."

"It's probably better to stay put."

"I know." She sighed slightly.

They'd spoken for a few more minutes, Meg extracting a promise that he would keep in touch until he got back to D.C. When he hung up, he hadn't been sure exactly what to feel. He'd missed Meg since they split, obscurely, but not enough to reach out to her, to make an effort. She had tried at first: an occasional phone call, an invitation to dinner with mutual friends. He'd always found some excuse, and after awhile (longer than maybe it should have taken) she stopped asking. He'd had other priorities at the time, so being free of those distractions had allowed him to focus on his work, the mission, changing the world.

"You're broken, John," she'd said to him when she left. "You break a little bit more each day, and I don't know what's causing it or how to stop it."

She'd been right, though he hadn't been able to see it at the time. Eight years after the fact, he'd finally begun to notice the tiny stress fractures in his psyche, building up over time.

Driving toward Takoma Park after his meeting with Yves, he _felt_ broken, as though he could almost feel himself straining and creaking under the pressure.

For the first time in his life, he felt old.

He pulled into the alley and turned off the van. The ancient parking brake squeaked in protest when he set it, the van lurching slightly as the engine settled to a stop. Frohike was the only one still awake when he got inside. The place was a disaster, pieces of equipment and the guts of computers littering the worktables. The physical mess just added to the psychological one, the pressure in Byers' chest, the feeling of not quite being able to breathe.

Frohike looked up from whatever he was examining under his magnifying glass. "Hey, buddy. Where've you been?"

"Out." Frohike raised an eyebrow, and Byers relented, "Following up a lead. It might be nothing, though."

"You okay, man?"

He went over to the fridge, without really thinking about it, and pulled out a longneck Sam Adams. He waved the bottle in Frohike's general direction. "You want one?"

"Sure," Frohike said, pushing the magnifying glass away and coming over to sit with Byers at the kitchen table.

Once both bottles were open and they were sitting with their hands cradled around the slightly damp glass, Byers said, "It's just been one of those days, you know?"

Frohike grinned. "There's another kind?" Then, after a long drink, "You want to talk about it?"

"Not particularly."

They sat without speaking for a few minutes, both sipping their beer.

Breaking the silence, Frohike finally said, "You ever think about taking a vacation, Byers? Take a week, go down to Aruba or PV or someplace? Get good and wasted, work on a tan, chat up some hot young thing in a bar?"

"Never."

"Maybe you should. Even Mulder used to run off to Graceland every once in awhile."

"Hey, we went to that Jimmy Buffet concert you wanted to see..."

"That was _two years_ ago, Byers, and seeing Buffet -- while the man is arguably a genius -- doesn't count as a vacation. And neither," he said, cutting Byers off before he could even contemplate getting the words out, "does Vegas. If there was ever anything less like a vacation..."

"All right, all right."

"Besides," Frohike continued, "I'm not talking about the three of us. I'm talking about you, getting away from all this for a couple days."

Byers took another drink. "The last time I did that terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center."

"Running off to see Susanne doesn't count, either. I thought we'd covered that with Vegas?"

"I'm not really sure what you're getting at."

"I'm saying that you should take some time, get some distance -- from us, from her, from the quest, but especially from _her_. You're like the walking dead, man. It's way worse this time than it was after Baltimore." He finished off his beer and set the bottle on the table with a determined clink. "I think we all need a little space, maybe a different perspective."

Frohike was staring past Byers' left shoulder, looking unusually serious. A sudden, horrible thought occurred to him. "You're not thinking about quitting, are you?"

"Nah." Frohike shook his head, looking at Byers again. "But it might not hurt us to re-evaluate things a little. It's not the same world it was six months ago."

"Everyone keeps saying that, but I'm not even sure what it means anymore." Byers finished his own beer and went to get another.

"Sure you are. You've been weird ever since New York -- weirder than usual, that is. You might be able to tell yourself that all this moody, existential angst is about Susanne or facing down your fortieth birthday..."

"Which isn't for another year and a half, thanks." He twisted the cap off and neatly dropped it into one of the clearly-labeled recycling bins before sitting back down.

"You think that's what it is, but it isn't," Frohike continued without missing a beat. "Not entirely, anyway. I'm feeling it, too. So's Langly. We just don't externalize the way you do."

"Externalize? Since when did you turn into Dr. Phil?"

Frohike ignored him. "You're a piss-poor bluffer. Everything you're feeling is right out there for the whole word to see -- and you feel _everything_. It's part of the reason you're a nice guy. But over the long term? It's bound to give you a stomach ulcer."

"I don't see how a week in some tourist trap is going to stop that."

"And that, my friend," Frohike aimed his empty bottle in the general direction of the recycling, "is exactly the problem."

"Are _you_ going somewhere?" Byers asked. "To the mountaintop, to find yourself?"

"Now you sound like Langly. Sarcasm doesn't work as well on you. Besides, if I were going to go on a vision quest, it would be all about Mardi Gras. Or Pamplona. Somewhere with blood, love, wine and wild women."

"How very Hemingway," Byers replied dryly.

"Look, just say you'll think about it."

"I'll think."

Frohike sighed and got up. "Are you heading to bed any time soon?" Byers shook his head. "Well, turn the lights off when you're done, then."

* * *

Sunday mornings were surprisingly sleepy and uneventful, largely by Frohike's decree. He'd ensured compliance with this rule early on in their partnership, by virtue of being the first out of bed on Sundays, heading to the kitchen and cooking the sort of breakfast that could break any man's will. Blueberry waffles had a way of pushing away all thoughts of work -- or, for that matter, all thoughts of anything beyond reading the paper and possibly taking an early afternoon nap.

All of which, of course, went exactly according to Frohike's plan.

When they'd started out together, Byers had still been at the FCC. He'd known he couldn't continue on working for the government, but had been afraid to leave the safety of his job. He hadn't had much in the way of savings, and hadn't expected (rightly) that his parents were too likely to be pleased by a move like that. Langly and Frohike had pooled their resources and set up shop in an old storefront near the U Street and Cardozo metro stop. Back then, that part of the city had been full of crumbling warehouses and abandoned industrial lofts. Within a few years, the area had undergone an 'urban renaissance' and they were no longer welcome among the high-end fitness clubs, antique shops and vegan restaurants. In 1989, though, it had just been them, surrounded by ancient PCs and a Xerox copier in that old store. With a full-time job during the week, Byers would head over there on Friday evenings and fling himself headlong into work all weekend: researching leads, checking facts, combing through de-classified reports. Sometimes he wouldn't even bother to sleep. After about a month of this, Frohike had turned up one Sunday morning to find Byers in the shirtsleeves and loosened tie he'd been wearing since the previous Friday and Langly passed out on a cot in the corner with a floppy disk clutched in one hand.

"I'm putting my foot down," was all he'd said, and disappeared for the better part of an hour.

He'd returned with coffee, egg-and-chorizo breakfast burritos, salsa fresca, home fries and a video cassette.

"Both of you are officially insane." He threw the video onto Byers' makeshift desk. "Put that on, wake Langly up and then find clean cups for the coffee."

A little surprised, Byers had complied. The video turned out to be _All the President's Men_, and the burritos had been fantastic. And so, a long-standing tradition had been born. No all-weekend work benders were permitted, except in the most dire of circumstances. Frohike kept them honest via huevos rancheros, freshly-squeezed juice and maple dutch babies. It had worked for going on twelve years, and that Sunday morning was no exception.

In the two weeks since Byers met Yves in the parking garage on 14th Street, he hadn't heard a thing from her. The morning's Eggs Benedict and hash browns had ensured he wasn't going to be worrying about it much until the following day, though. Not bothering to change out of his bedroom slippers, he propped his feet up on the couch, leaned back and began sorting through the newspapers delivered that morning.

"Has anyone seen my _New York Times_?" he asked, frowning and flipping through the stack of papers.

"Oh, yeah," Frohike said from the kitchen, brandishing a soapy skillet in his direction. "Jimmy must've finished the crossword puzzle."

Langly snorted from across the room.

"You two are really too hard on him..." Byers began.

"And you're too soft on the kid, but now is not the time to have that argument again. And, no, I haven't seen the _Times_. You're pretty much the only one who reads it."

Byers got up, his full stomach and tryptophan-buzzed brain protesting a little, and went to look for it. He found the paper sitting next to his computer, folded neatly. As he shook it open, he noticed something scrawled in the lower left-hand corner of the front page: a 'B6' written in block letters and red marker. Who on earth would leave a message like that on their copy of the _New York Times_? His _New York Times_, he realized and had to sit down. The subscription for the Sunday Edition was in his name, and none of the others ever read it -- something that wouldn't have been at all hard for Yves to find out. He opened the paper to section B-6, his foggy Sunday brain finally catching on. He laughed, a little sharply, under his breath. At least she knew her history; he had to give her that.

The message was brief. A time and place.

It was going to be tricky, getting out of there without being noticed, especially on a Sunday. But he couldn't risk missing whatever it was Yves had to tell him.

He folded the paper up and tucked it under one arm as he walked back over to the couch. If he were meeting anyone but Yves, he'd just call Jimmy and ask for a ride. They occasionally went and grabbed a beer together, so it wouldn't arouse any suspicions. Frohike would probably just lecture him about indulging Jimmy too much, as though Jimmy were a spoiled, favorite nephew and not their sole source of venture capital. As it was, though, he couldn't risk bring Jimmy anywhere near Yves. If there was one thing guaranteed to make her bolt, it was Jimmy's presence. Byers had his own theory about why that was the case, but had no doubt Yves would vigorously deny it.

"Hey, Byers," Langly said, looking up from his computer. "I'm going to meet our snitch from the DoD on Tuesday afternoon. He says he has proof that the CIA is trying to pin 9/11 on Saddam Hussein. Want to come?"

"I can't. I have lunch plans."

"With that mysterious source of yours?" Frohike asked.

"No. I'm meeting Meg." He hadn't mentioned her phone call in New York, or any of their subsequent meetings. Langly and Frohike hadn't known her all that well to begin with, so he hadn't really seen the point.

"Seriously, man? When did that happen?"

"Nothing's happened. It's just lunch."

"I thought she hated you, dude," Langly said bluntly. At Frohike's exasperated look, he said, "What? Don't most divorced people hate each other?"

"She seemed like a nice enough kid," Frohike said, ignoring him. "From what I remember, anyway. It's been awhile."

"9/11 shook her up pretty badly. She wants to make peace, be friends again."

"Can't say I blame her," Frohike said. "Good for you, Byers. It's not ten days in the Caymans, but it's something."

He grinned as he said, but Byers felt unaccountably annoyed with him.

"Are either of you planning on using the van tonight? I have some errands I need to run."

"On a Sunday? What are you doing?"

'Dry-cleaning," he lied. "I have a little extra change, so I'll fill the van up. I thought I might pick up some groceries, too. We're running low on milk, and beer."

"Sure, okay. Pick up some bagels, too, if you remember," Frohike said. Langly just shrugged.

"Thanks, guys."

* * *

The rooftop bar at Perry's was a staple of the Adams Morgan scene, and had been as long as Byers could remember. Not that he'd ever been much-inclined to go. The crowd was as trendy as the decor, a crush of bright, bold, beautiful people against a backdrop of color and the setting sun. Warmer weather had blown up from the Carolina coast earlier in the week, bringing with it the first signs of a D.C. spring and ensuring that Perry's was packed to its limits, even though it was Sunday night.

Yves sat alone at a table for two, looking entirely at ease and blending effortlessly with the college kids and young hipsters in the crowd. A jewel-toned cocktail in a highball glass sat on the table beside her, even though it didn't look like she'd actually touched it. The young men at the bar kept shooting exploratory looks her way, but she ignored them. He couldn't blame them. She looked pretty, deceptively soft. He hadn't seen her wear a dress since Miami. It suited her.

"This is an interesting choice," he said, walking over to the table and taking a seat. "You blend in well, though."

"You don't," she said shortly.

"Thanks for the reminder."

"You might at least have dressed the part. I did." She leaned forward a little, smiling at him. "Now, pretend we're friends."

He smiled back. "I doubt I own anything that wouldn't look out of place here. I let my subscription to _Maxim_ lapse a long time ago."

"Oh, I'm sure you only looked at it for the pictures of half-naked girls, anyway."

"That's more Frohike's department, actually," he replied tartly.

"Signs of life!" she said. "Thank god. I thought this was going to be boring." She smiled at him again, and this time he actually thought it was genuine and not just for the benefit of anyone who might be watching. "I ordered sushi. And a scotch. You drink scotch, don't you?"

"Yes, I do," he said, impressed in spite of himself. "I don't eat sushi, though."

"I know that. I thought it was time to expand your horizons."

She shifted slightly in her chair, crossing and uncrossing her legs, tilting her head to one side. Anyone watching them, he reflected, would probably think they were on a date.

"Why scotch?" she asked conversationally. "Did your father drink it?"

"What makes you say that?"

She shrugged. "Most men who drink scotch picked it up from their fathers. At least, that's been my experience."

"Shouldn't we get down to business?" he said, not especially wanting to discuss his father.

"I was always taught that the best business was conducted with hospitality."

_And who taught you that? _Your_ father?_ he thought, wondering about the hints of her past he'd been able to uncover. _Or are you just talking?_

Aloud, he said, "All right."

The server brought his scotch, neat. He wasn't enough of a connoisseur to tell by taste what label it was, let alone what year, but it definitely tasted expensive.

The sushi arrived not longer after, and he took a tentative bite of something orange and shiny.

Yves leaned back and said, "Now we can get to business. I've found a possible lead." She reached into her deceptively small bag, a beaded square of sapphire blue silk fastened with an antique clasp, and took out a folded piece of paper. She smoothed it flat on the table and turned it toward him. "A woman fitting the description you gave me was detained at the Philadelphia airport on the morning of September 11. There's no record of her ever being released."

"What was she charged with?"

Yves gave him an inscrutable look. "They don't have to charge you with anything. They can simply detain you, make you disappear. You ought to know that better than anyone." There a was a moment's pause. "She's a ghost."

"I thought you said you thought she was alive...?"

"'Ghosts' are off-the-record prisoners. Completely unofficial and invisible. Not allowed access to legal representation, to any outside communication -- including medical or human rights groups. If asked, the government would deny that they had her."

"As you say, hasn't the government always done that?"

"Under special circumstances, yes. But now, particularly with cases relating -- however obliquely -- to terrorism, it's become much more commonplace." She paused, frowning. "One might even say popular."

"I guess it cuts down on all that annoying paperwork, if nothing else."

"And opens up avenues for, shall we say, 'alternative' methods of interrogation," she said grimly. "This woman is designated Detainee #10013 in the files I was able to access, but I haven't been able to find any detail beyond that. I don't know where she's being held, or even whether we're on the right track. Getting that information may be slightly trickier."

"When you say 'trickier,' what exactly do you mean?"

"I mean, there's no complete electronic record. Those systems are too easily compromised. All this information is held in a storehouse in Crystal City; hard copies only, using an old-fashion filing system."

"Meaning?"

She smiled at him and finally took a sip of her drink. "We'll have to break in."

* * *

He suspected that Meg picked the Rock Bottom for lunch on purpose. For one thing, it was neutral territory. For another, the way he'd been feeling lately, the name seemed suspiciously appropriate. The pub was a throwback to the sort of place they would have gone together in college, a life so far removed from the person he'd become, it almost seemed like it had happened to someone else. The Rock Bottom also tended to play a lot of late-eighties alt-pop, capitalizing, no doubt, on the cultural no-man's-land inhabited by the late Baby Boomers and early Gen-Xers that made up the restaurant's lunch crowd.

The greater D.C. area wasn't exactly known for its bistro culture: opening up a CitySearch listing on the city returned upwards of twenty TGI Friday's as the top search results. Neither of their tastes ran to trendy spots like Perry's, and even those were fairly few and far between. But they'd managed to find a few decent places, though most of those had been up in Baltimore. They studiously avoided anywhere they might have gone together as a married couple, even though neither one acknowledged the fact out loud.

The idea to rekindle their friendship had been Meg's initially, born in the chaotic, bewildering days following 9/11. After that first phone call, he emailed her each day at her request, right along with Langly, Frohike, Jimmy, his father. Adding her to his email address book was like an unofficial, high-tech welcome back into the family. He'd stayed on in the city for a few days afterward, allowing others who more desperately needed those airplane seats to go home first. He and Greg, the Atlanta pharmaceutical rep, met some firefighters at a local coffeeshop on the 13th, and asked what, if anything, they could do to help. Greg had been a volunteer firefighter at Georgia Tech and was quickly deputized and put to work. Byers, though, was relegated to fetching coffee and bagels. He suspected the firefighters had taken pity on him a little, recognizing their own frustration in him. It didn't matter. At least he'd been able to do something, however small.

Flying back into D.C., the 737 had banked sharply, following its unfamiliar, national security-imposed flight path, eliciting gasps from nervous passengers. Byers just leaned his head against the window and looked down into Arlington, where the Pentagon was still smoking slightly, one of its imposing walls crumpled in on itself. That sight, almost more than the Trade Towers, shook him to his core. For as long as he could remember the Pentagon had symbolized strength. It hadn't always been positive strength, but the kind of power that represented the country at its individual best and collective worst, a symbol of honor and service, secrecy and almost insurmountable will. When it was abused, there was nothing more terrible and destructive. He'd pledged his whole life to battling that abuse, in whatever way he could. But what now? The entire world seemed suddenly and abruptly unfamiliar.

"Glad you're back," was all Frohike said when he'd walked in the door. Langly just nodded vaguely and went back to his computer. He hadn't really expected much more. He knew them well enough by now to see how relieved they truly were. Jimmy, though, enveloped him in a rib-cracking hug and nearly lifted him off the ground.

The first thing he'd done, after tossing his garment bag across his bed, was to dig his cell phone out of his carry-on bag and call Meg.

"I'd like to see you, but I understand if you don't want to," she'd said. "I just feel like I need to reconnect with people."

"Even me?" he'd said, a little wryly in spite of himself.

"Maybe especially you, John. I didn't cut you out of my life on purpose, you know. We just... drifted."

_He'd_ drifted, he thought. But that had been the problem in the first place, hadn't it?

Even so, they'd managed to have lunch together eight times since September.

"One for every year we were together," she'd joked the last time, "and one for every year we've been apart."

"Sixteen years? You really know how to make me feel old, don't you?"

"And that doesn't even count the three years we were apart the first time."

They'd run into each other again in 1990, in the wake of Susanne and Fox Mulder, barely two months after he'd finally given notice at the FCC. He'd seen Meg again, for the first time since college, at an old friend's wedding. She'd been a bridesmaid, and he could recall sitting in the uncomfortable pews of a stuffy old church in downtown Columbia watching her try not to trip over the hem of her dowdy, teal green dress. At the reception, he tried to keep his distance. The truth of it was he'd never quite forgiven her for breaking things off the way she had.

At that point, fate, as seemed to happen so often in his life, intervened.

Meg caught the bouquet toss (despite her best efforts to the contrary), caught her heel on the hem of her ugly dress and went sprawling into the nearest table. He stood up and caught her, an automatic reflex. The whole scene was captured on tape by the wedding videographer, of course, and was hauled out at least once a year for the next four.

By that next summer, they were married. They'd had an intensely private ceremony at a small inn up in the mountains in Pennsylvania, only inviting family and close friends. Carol and Meg's friend Penny made up the entire wedding party. His mother had been there, of course, but his father had pointedly stayed home. Langly and Frohike hadn't even been invited. Back then he'd still been attempting to keep his work separate from his personal life. Of course, back then he'd still actually _had_ a personal life. Now, even in his privatest moments, he still didn't think of Susanne as 'personal,' exactly. The distinction was too difficult to make. She was too tangled up with the cause, the mission, with what he was trying to accomplish and the man he'd become.

Thinking about Susanne, he noticed a slender blonde standing at the bar, chatting with the bartender. Dressed in the standard uniform of a young D.C. professional -- charcoal grey suit in summer-weight wool, silk blouse, a briefcase resting on the barstool by her right hand -- she was teetering on skinny high heels and trying not to sweat through her long-sleeved Ann Taylor shirt. She didn't look like Susanne, exactly, but was definitely reminiscent of her somehow, a similar type. He tried not to stare, but his gaze kept drifting over to her.

"I wish I'd known you'd developed a taste for bombshell blondes," Meg said, from somewhere above his left shoulder, causing him to start guiltily. "I'd have gotten a dye job years ago."

She took the seat across from him with a slightly knowing smile, shrugging out of her jacket and signaling to the waiter.

Meg was thirty-six, smooth-skinned, petite and brunette. While not exactly pretty by traditional standards, she was open and sweet-looking; there was something altogether appealing about her. People liked her instinctively.

"It's crowded in here today," she said, waving imaginary cigarette smoke away from her face. "I was in Seattle last year. You know, people don't smoke in restaurants there? It's not like there's a law or anything, they just don't. I wish that would catch on here."

"It'll never happen. Virginia is tobacco country."

"Is this going to turn into a conversation about the unholy alliance between special interests in the tobacco industry and our 'so-called representative government'? Because, if so, I'm going to need a lemonade first."

As though summoned by her words, the waiter appeared, taking their drink orders and letting them know that the day's specials included a chicken cheesesteak sandwich and a wood-fired Thai shrimp pizza.

When he left, Byers said, "I'll spare you the tobacco industry lecture this time. Although, they _are_ completely insidious..."

Meg smiled and shook her head. "I'll give you this, you don't change."

"Coming from my ex-wife, I'm fairly sure that isn't a compliment."

"You might be surprised," she replied mildly, and changed the subject. "How's your dad?"

"Still hiding in a cabin in Wyoming or somewhere, as far as I know. We only speak occasionally."

Their drinks arrived: an iced tea for him and a raspberry lemonade for her. She frowned at the garnish clinging wetly to the rim of her glass and dumped it unceremoniously onto the bread plate. "That's still an improvement, isn't it?"

"Over ten years of pretending we weren't related? Sure." He picked up her discarded lemon and squeezed it into his tea.

She smiled at that, and took a drink of lemonade through her straw. "I was actually surprised you didn't sue, with the morgue misidentifying that car thief as your dad."

"Lawyers," he said. "Why is your first instinct always to sue? Besides, it wouldn't have been worth it. I was just glad he was alive." He felt a brief flash of guilt. Another lie in a long string. No wonder she'd left him.

"Lawyers play a vital role in the functioning of a free society. After all, where would you be without the Freedom of Information Act? Lawyers did that, you know-" She broke off as her cell phone began to ring. "I'm sorry. I thought I turned that thing off." She picked it up and looked at the display. "Oh, it's just Jack." She muted the ringer. "He'll call back. Besides, it'll do him some good to wonder where I am."

"And who's Jack?" he asked, in what he hoped was a casual manner.

"Just someone. Well, maybe no one... but possibly someone... You know what? Ask me next week." She laughed, blushing slightly and dropping her phone into her bag. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen her blush.

"It's a little strange, isn't it?" he said before he could stop himself. "You and me, talking like this. About our lives, relationships, other people."

"You mean talking like friends?" she said, her smile fading a little.

"Yes."

"We were friends in the beginning, remember?" she said. "If it's up to me, we'll always be friends. I still care about you."

"Do you? I'm a much different person than I was back then."

"In some ways," she said, "but not in fundamentals."

He wasn't so sure about that anymore.

* * *

Looming just outside the District, Crystal City boasted the closest approximations to actual skyscrapers in the metro area. Across the Potomac, D.C. sprawled, squat and flattened by city ordinance; but Crystal City, a natural outgrowth of Arlington's military presence, built by necessity during a 1970s explosion of defense contractors and government offices, soared up toward the clouds. The buildings, though, were all fairly non-nondescript, as though their designers had feared overshadowing the city's more famous and distinctive structures.

Yves had parked their borrowed maintenance van in the shadow of one of those tall buildings, wedged into a corner of the uncomfortable, cramped triangle formed by the Hyatt Regency on one side and the two adjacent federal buildings. They were in the back of the van, the rough carpet biting into Byers' knees. Yves was sitting Indian-style, with wireless communications equipment spread out in front of her.

"This has to be quick: in and out, nothing fancy," she said, handing him an earpiece and fiddling with frequency on her own.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Byers could practically _hear_ Frohike making an off-color remark in response to that, but all he said was, "Fine. I understand. I'll follow your lead." He paused. "Though wouldn't it be more effective for you to go in alone?"

"There are two reasons I want you with me. One, you know what to look for better than I do. And, two, I think you ought to risk your own skin for this at least a little, don't you?"

"It's not a matter of cowardice, Yves. I'm just not very good at this sort of thing. I'm usually the one who waits in the van."

"Like I said," she looked down, strapping something to her belt, "it's time to expand your horizons. Besides, I seem to recall something about you breaking into a fertility clinic awhile back..."

"That was a fairly unusual situation. Plus, I very nearly got us killed."

"That isn't the way Jimmy tells the story." She got to her knees, reaching over and clipping something to his belt in turn. "Don't lose that."

"And since when do you take Jimmy at his word?"

She sat back on her heels, hands on her hips. "While I'm aware that Jimmy fairly worships the ground you walk on, the story didn't seem altogether far-fetched."

It was the first time she'd mentioned Jimmy by name since Byers had found her again.

"He never talks about you," he said abruptly, watching her for a reaction.

She didn't give him one, not a twitch. Instead, she said, "Don't you want to know why I'm helping you?"

It was a fairly smart strategy. He challenged her boundaries, so she feinted at his.

"I don't really care." He'd anticipated this kind of give-and-take, but, even so, the edge in his own voice surprised him a little. "I don't care why you're doing it, as long as you do it."

"Can you hear me on this thing?" she asked, speaking softly into the tiny mouthpiece. He nodded.

"I figured it was partly self-preservation, anyway," he said, after a moment, his voice echoing through the equipment and feeding back slightly with an electronic hiss. "With a background like yours, the last thing you want is for certain people to look too closely at you -- especially these days."

That got a reaction from her, slight but definitely there. "Perhaps I misjudged you," she said. "You're more ruthless than I thought."

"I haven't got a whole lot to lose anymore."

"Who does?" After a moment, she said, "Of course, if we get caught, none of that will matter. We'll both disappear, down to Cuba or to Riyadh. Or possibly somewhere even more unspeakable."

"So, I guess you're damned if you do, damned if you d-"

"I don't believe you'd turn me in, Byers. Not yet. If it were a choice between my life and this Susanne's? Maybe then. But it isn't -- again, not yet." She looked up, out the window, and then down at her watch. "Get ready."

As she spoke, a light went off on the third floor of the leftmost building.

"That will be the last clerk leaving. Security will make a last sweep to ensure that everyone's out of the building. After that, we have twenty-five minutes before they come back through. Be quick, be quiet, and do exactly as I say. Understand?"

He nodded.

"All right. We go in five minutes then."

In what felt like far less than five minutes, they were out of the van and making their way toward one of the side doors. Inside, Yves said, was an emergency stairwell. As they reached the door, she pulled out a tiny electronic lock-pick and attached it to the push-button keypad that armed the door.

It was the only visible lock on the entrance.

The building was vintage 1970s, and the security didn't appear to have been updated much since then, either. That realization sent a shiver down his back. What if they had the wrong place? He said as much aloud.

Yves just smiled grimly. "Just because there are new regulations for security, it doesn't mean there's actually any budget to fund them. This is the place, Byers. Just relax."

She finished with the key-pad and the door opened with a soft click. Pulling a small roll of electrical tape from a pocket, Yves smoothed a piece over the locking mechanism to hold it open.

"Low-tech, but effective," she said, grabbed him by the sleeve and took off at a brisk walk through a darkened corridor and up the stairs.

Illuminated only by glowing 'Exit' signs, they crept quietly up to the third floor landing. Yves did her magic with the keypad and duct tape again, and they were inside.

It felt way too easy.

The sort of breaking and entering he'd done in the past, with Langly and Frohike, with Mulder, had always seemed much more complicated and usually involving tangling with harnesses and high tech gadgets.

At least so far, he preferred Yves' way.

They walked through the reception area, Yves taking a tiny penlight from one pocket. The archive room was just beyond, it was windowless and Yves twisted the little light to life once they were inside. A desk stood to one side of the room, an uncomfortable 1960s-era office chair pushed against a file cabinet behind it. A dart board hung on the wall opposite, the paint around it pockmarked from years of missed shots.

"What a horribly boring job that must be," he whispered.

"Not everyone can lead lives of danger and excitement like ours," she said, and he couldn't quite tell whether she was joking or not. "You go left. I'll go right."

He took out his own flashlight, playing it across the carefully cataloged boxes of files. The boxes appeared to be in order by identification number. Each box had tiny squares of white paper fastened to the front and labeled with the sequence of file numbers inside.

This first one read '8850 – 9100'. They'd been at this a long time.

He took off down one of the long aisles, trying to get his bearings.

"Byers."

He mostly controlled his urge to jump at the sound. Mostly. Somehow Yves had managed to sneak up behind him. He turned to face her.

"Byers, look at this. Make sure it's what you're after."

She handed him a stack of thick files. He flipped the folder open and looked at the first page.

File #10013. Female. 37 years old. Detained in Philadelphia on 9/11/2001. Previously wanted in connection with crimes against the U.S. Government. Initially presumed dead.

No name, no other details. But it was enough.

"Yes," he said, forcing himself to whisper. "Yes, this looks like it."

"Good. Let's get out of here."

He followed her back through the office, putting things back exactly as they were. Boxes replaced, doors locked, tape removed. It looked as though they'd never been inside. It might be months before anyone even noticed the file was missing.

Back downstairs, Yves ripped the final strip of tape from the outside door and let it close softly. Before he knew it, they were back in the van and headed toward Arlington, the files still clutched in his hands.

"That was... easy," he said. "Is that why you agreed to help me? Because you knew it wasn't a difficult job?"

"Any job can be difficult, given the right circumstances," she replied, turning the van onto Route 1 and heading toward Alexandria.

"Where are we going?"

"My place," Yves said, and didn't speak to him again until they pulled up to the drive-through window of an Arby's along the way. At his look of surprise, she simply shrugged and said, "I'm starving. You want to split an order of jalapeño poppers?"

Unsure what else to do, he nodded. He'd never pegged Yves as a mocha milkshake type, either, but just chalked it up to learning something new every day.

Yves' place turned out to be a small but well-appointed brownstone just off Duke Street. She parked the van a suitable distance away and got out. Byers hiked after her, toting the files and a bag of curly fries.

"You live here?" he said when they were standing on the front stoop.

"This month," she replied, opening the door and letting him walk in first. He turned and watched her fasten the locks. He noticed she had almost as many as they did at home.

Sliding the final deadbolt home, she said, "Have a seat."

She deposited the bags of fast food on a low coffee table and switched on a lamp. The apartment was nicely furnished if spartan, the rugs and furniture fine quality but nondescript. Yves didn't appear to own any artwork or photographs. She did, however, have a plasma flat-screen television hanging on the wall above a small entertainment center that housed an Asian prototype media PC and wireless keyboard.

He spread the files out on the thick carpeting. Yves tipped a handful of ketchup packets onto the table and sat down beside him, taking half of one of the sandwiches in one hand. She leaned over the papers, reading as she ate.

"Well," she said, looking up after a moment, "now you have a location. At least, as of last month."

"Yes, I do."

"And what are you going do now that you know where they're holding this woman?" she asked.

"Go there. Find her. Bring her home."

Yves sighed slightly, setting the sandwich down and wiping her fingers with a paper napkin. "As plans go? That isn't a particularly good one, Byers."

"But it's what I have to do."

"You're also aware that we don't know for sure whether this particular prisoner is the woman you're looking for?"

"I am." He picked up the other half of the sandwich and took a bite.

She watched him for a moment. "Why is this so important? Who is this woman?"

"Shouldn't you have asked me this before you agreed to help?"

"I'm curious _now_," she said, picking at one of the ketchup packets. "Who is she? A lover? Sister? Friend? Sole remaining witness to the Kennedy assassination?"

"Funny," he said, shortly. He finished the sandwich and crumpled up the waxy wrapper. "Anyway, I would have thought you'd know everything by now."

"I know who Susanne Modeski is. Or _was_, according all official sources. What I want to know is, who she is to you, and why you're risking your life for her."

Yves was watching him intently. She leaned back against the table, the papers and remnants of fast food scattered between them like they were college kids on a study date

"I love her," he said at last. "But it's more than just that." He held up a hand "That's all you get to know. That's all you need to know, for now."

She seemed to struggle with her curiosity for a moment, but finally nodded. "You're going to need a better plan."

"I know," he said.

"In fact, the best plan of all would be to forget about this. Or find another way to help her."

"I know that, too."

"But you're determined to do it this way?" She looked away from him, resting her arms on her knees.

"I am."

"And I suppose you're going to want help?"

"I'd rather. But I'll do it even without you."

She sighed again. "Come on then. I'll drive you home. We'll figure something out tomorrow."

(Continued in Part 2.)


	3. Undone

Title: **The Geek Rock Series**  
Fandom: The Lone Gunmen  
(Part 2 of 8)

In this installment... fast cars, fast women, a snitch named Steve, hints of Jimmy's hidden depths, Starbucks jokes, Watergate jokes, the Department of Homeland Security's somewhat shady origins and more proof that Frohike Knows Best.

**2. Undone (The Sweater Song)**

Summary: "If you want to destroy my sweater, pull this thread as I walk away."

_Oh no it goes, it gone, bye bye, do I think, I sink and I die  
If you want to destroy my sweater pull  
This thread as I walk away.  
As I walk away!  
Watch me unravel, I'll soon be naked.  
Lying on the floor, lying on the floor!  
I've come undone.  
_

Over the years, Byers had come to expect he might be called upon to do some unusual, even unpleasant, things in the pursuit of truth and justice. In the past thirteen years he had lied, fought, perpetrated petty thefts, defied the F.B.I., spent the night in jail, even committed the occasional felony. But one thing he could honestly say he'd never anticipated was new car shopping with Jimmy Bond.

"I think I can get a pretty good trade-in on the Trans Am," Jimmy was saying from behind the wheel of a sleek, black sports car, the make and model of which Byers had already forgotten.

The sun was bright, the air already a little sticky even though it was barely ten o'clock. Spring in D.C. had a way of just appearing like that, as though someone, somewhere, had thrown a switch. Every April the weather went from rainy and cold to hot and humid in the space of a heartbeat. Jimmy was sprawled across the leather bucket-seat, a hand resting on the steering wheel and a leg poking out the open door.

"What do you say we take it for a spin?" he said. He was wearing shades, the same gunmetal grey as the chrome on the car. "You can drive this time."

"I've never really been much of a car guy, Jimmy."

"Aw. Come on." He slid out of the driver's seat, grabbing Byers by the shoulder and urging him forward. "Give it a try. I guarantee it won't disappoint."

The salesman, who had been hovering deferentially all this time, hurried forward. "You'd like a test drive?"

"Definitely." Jimmy walked around and got into the passenger's seat. The salesman handed Byers the keys, then jumped into the back.

"Why don't we take it out onto 66?" the salesman suggested as Byers turned the key in the ignition."Open it up a little."

Jimmy reached over and automatically switched the radio to WHFS and a techno-flavored remix of the Beastie Boys.

They drove for awhile, the salesman spouting jargon while Jimmy listened and nodded seriously. It really was, Byers was forced to admit, a very nice car. Eventually, he pulled over and let Jimmy drive. Jimmy rolled down the windows, turned the radio up and grinned the whole time. Byers chanced a glance in the rearview and could see the salesman smiling at the prospect of an impending sale.

He was right to. Jimmy bought the car.

Byers, who had never bought a brand new car in his life, watched in fascination while the other two haggled politely over paperwork, financing and trade-in value. Then he watched as Jimmy casually tossed in what seemed to him an obscene amount of cash as an additional down payment and drove the car off the lot.

Out on the freeway again, Byers shook his head and said, "I'm impressed."

"A car's an investment. If you let it lose its value, you lose money on the investment." Jimmy shrugged. "Plus, I just got an advance for being in this football documentary."

"A documentary?"

"Yeah. I always said no to stuff like that before. You know, I had plenty of money already, so I felt like it was... uh, you know..."

"Excessive?"

"But now," he grinned at Byers. "Now the money isn't just for me. So I feel like it's okay to take it."

"It would have been okay before, Jimmy," he said.

But Jimmy shook his head. "Not for me, not back then. Too many of those guys I knew... It stopped being about the game; it was about the money. _Just_ the money, and the things money could get them: fancy cars, big houses, big parties, drugs, women."

"But you loved football."

"Everything about it."

"Why did you quit?" Byers asked suddenly, realizing that none of them had ever bothered before.

"Things happen," Jimmy said, tightening his grip on the steering wheel and focusing on the road.

"Like w-"

"Hey, do you want to stop off and grab a burger?" Jimmy asked, very clearly changing the subject. "I'm starving. We can split a basket of fries."

The words reminded Byers of the last time he'd seen Yves, and he had to stifle a sudden flash of guilt. What would Jimmy say if he knew about that?

She'd dropped out of their lives after Miami, disappearing as abruptly as she'd appeared, and no one had really seemed to care much. Except, of course, Jimmy. He'd never said anything, but after all this time, Byers could tell. It wasn't as though Jimmy was all that hard to read to begin with.

_I really ought to tell him_, he thought. Despite their differences, despite how occasionally exhausting Jimmy could be, he really did consider him a friend.

He wouldn't tell, though, and he knew it. He'd been all through this with himself before. No matter how guilty he felt, he wasn't going to tell Jimmy anything. He'd promised Yves, of course, but he knew that wasn't the real reason he'd chosen to keep quiet, the reason he _continued_ to keep quiet. If he betrayed her trust, even if it was for her own good, she wouldn't help him find Susanne – and that, he knew in his heart of hearts, made him a selfish bastard.

"Yeah, sure," he said at last, looking over at Jimmy. "Let's go get a burger."

* * *

Byers was getting weirder by the day, and coming from Melvin Frohike that was saying something.

Byers had spent the morning cruising around car dealerships with Jimmy and hanging out in bars with people Frohike was more accustomed to seeing on the cover of _Sports Illustrated_. The very concept of Byers having a beer before 11:30 on a Tuesday was weird enough in itself, but throw in the fact that he'd come home talking about fuel injection and all-wheel drive, his tie tucked haphazardly in his coat pocket, and you had more weirdness than Frohike was quite equipped to handle.

"So," he said tentatively, "how did it go?"

"You get Jimmy all tucked in for a nap after his big day?" Langly had been in a crappy mood all morning, looking to pick a fight. Frohike had so far refused to indulge him, but Byers straightened up abruptly at the words and turned a cold eye on Langly. "Seriously, Byers. Why do you even bother?"

Frohike winced, and waited for Byers to respond in that clipped, repressed tone he used whenever he was really cheesed off. He didn't. He just shoved a check at Langly, shrugged off his suit jacket and walked away.

"Oh," Langly said, actually looking genuinely apologetic. "Sorry, man."

"Nice, Langly," Frohike said. "Real nice."

He followed Byers over to the far end of the room, where the other man was seated in front of his laptop pretending to read through email.

"We can't continue to take his money if both of you really feel that way about him," Byers said at last. "It isn't right."

"It's not that," Frohike said, sitting down beside him. "I think it's that Langly doesn't like feeling like we owe him. I don't like it much myself." He paused. "Besides, Langly's still got emotional damage from high school. The big football star slumming with us misfits for kicks? That's got to sting a little."

"Well, he needs to get over it."

"What's this really about, Byers? I mean, I know you like the kid and all... but there's something else going on here."

"Is it at all possible for us to have a conversation that doesn't involve you practicing amateur psychoanalysis on me?" he snapped. "It's getting really old."

"I'm just worried about you," Frohike replied, because it was it true. He was worried about Langly lately, too, but Byers seemed more immediately on the verge of imploding.

Somewhere along the way he'd wound up playing surrogate dad to these two screw-ups. How exactly had that happened? He'd even caught Jimmy giving him that look a few times, that 'Hey, Dad! Look at me!' look. He didn't know much about Jimmy's background, but he got that same sense from the kid: a gaping Dad-shaped hole smack in the middle of his psyche. A need to have a hero, or, failing that, _be_ a hero.

What a sorry collection of characters they all were.

Of course, Frohike's own dad had been a great guy, so he wasn't entirely sure what his excuse was. Maybe it was the excitement and adventure. It certainly wasn't the money – or the chicks. The women they met in this line of work tended to be the kind who would rip out your heart as soon as look at you – and he was including the former Dr. Modeski in that assessment. Not that he'd ever say as much to Byers. Not directly, anyway.

He shook his head, as though he could physically push the thoughts away. That sort of soul-searching was best done alone, in the dark, over a bottle of Jack Daniels, if at all possible – not on a sunny Tuesday afternoon.

The best thing for all of them was to keep moving, for the moment. They'd figure out the rest later.

"Get your coat, Byers," he said. "I've got a lead on a story at Georgetown."

"Take Langly," Byers replied shortly, still staring at his screen.

"Langly's busy." Frohike picked up the suit jacket Byers had draped across the back of the chair and tossed it at him. "Let's go."

With a slight sigh, Byers shut down the computer and put on his coat. Once they were out in the van, he said, "What's this story we're chasing?"

"I'm actually a little fuzzy on the details."

Byers made a face that clearly expressed his disapproval.

"Over the past couple weeks, I've been getting emails from this guy. A PhD. He says he's one of our readers and that he has a story that might, and I quote, 'be right up our alley'."

"And you believe him?" Byers made the face again.

"Of course not. But I thought it was worth checking out. The guy was nothing if not insistent. It might turn out to be nothing, but if it isn't..."

The History Department at Georgetown was located in a squat, modern building, done in the worst style of late-20th Century university architecture.

"Not exactly ivy-covered halls, are they?" Frohike said, as they walked through the automatic double doors and into the chemically cooled interior. The department apparently already had their air conditioning running even though it was barely 65 degrees outside.

"I think this is it," Byers said, pointing at a name plate on one of the doors, nearly obscured by posters and political cartoons. The door was half-open already, so he knocked, then eased it the rest of the way open.

The outer office was a mess of books and papers, tossed haphazardly over chairs, desks and stools. A student was sitting cross-legged next to a shape that might have been a second-hand sofa if not for the stacks of journal articles, sorting through them and putting them into plastic file boxes. She only looked up when Byers cleared his throat.

She had straw-colored hair plaited into Pipi Longstocking braids, haute-geek horn-rimmed glasses and freckles across her nose. The overall effect made her look about twelve.

"We're here to see Dr. Moncrieff."

She blinked at them through her glasses and Frohike had the sense that she didn't really need them to see.

"We don't have an appointment," Byers prompted gently.

The girl shook her head and stood up. "Sorry. It's just that you look a little old to be taking Western Civ, and the administration usually sends its threats via email." She brushed imaginary dust from her jeans. "Who should I tell him is here?"

"Just tell him we're from The Lone Gunmen Publishing Group. He'll know who we are."

Obviously, so did she. She raised an eyebrow and gave them a closer look before knocking on the door to the inner office. It opened a crack and she stuck her head in.

"Reg? There are some people to see you. They're from…" The rest of her words were lost as she leaned farther into the office.

"Really?" the voice from inside the office sounded absolutely delighted. "Send them in, send them in!"

She held the door wide for them. "You heard the man."

Dr. Moncrieff looked to be in his early forties, dark-haired and going a bit silver at the temples, but he greeted them with boyish enthusiasm.

"You know, I didn't really think you'd come. I really didn't." His spectacles slipped down the bridge of his nose and he pushed them back into place with a distracted hand.

He reached out and shook each of their hands vigorously, like a dog that had just learned a new trick. His graduate student was still standing in the doorway.

"Kate?" he said. "You know I hate to ask, but do we have any coffee brewed?"

"And you know I don't mind getting coffee, so you should stop apologizing," she said. "Gentlemen? Cream, sugar?"

"Just black, thanks," Frohike said. "Maybe a shot of JB, if you have it."

"Funny." She turned to Byers. "And you?"

"Nothing, thank you."

Moncrieff offered them each chairs, though he had to clear the stacks of books from them first. Kate brought in coffee, and when she handed Moncrieff his mug, a look passed between them that Frohike couldn't quite decipher.

"Thank you," he said. "You're welcome to stay and listen, Kate, if you'd like..."

"That's- That's all right. I need to finish grading the exams for the 104 class. It's at 3:45, Reg. Don't get so caught up in this that you forget, okay?"

"I won't, I won't," he said, bounding after her and shutting the door.

There was something vaguely doggy about Moncrieff overall. He put Frohike in mind of a large and mildly befuddled sheepdog.

"Professor-" Byers began, folding his hands in his lap.

Moncrieff sat back down behind his desk and held up a hand. "Even my students call me Reg. Please."

"All right," Byers said. "You contacted us-"

"That's right," Frohike stepped in. "I'm the one who responded to your emails. You said you had a lead on a story we might be interested in?"

"Yes, yes. You have a very interesting publication, by the way. I've been using it in my higher level classes for several years now..."

Byers turned to Frohike with a look of disbelief, then back to the professor. "You use _The Lone Gunman_ as a resource for your classes? I wouldn't have thought our paper would exactly be suitable for the reading list, if you take my-"

"I like to include a, uh, wide variety of perspectives." He grinned. "You should have seen Kate's face when she made up the reading packets for the 301 sections. Your articles came right after _The Washington Times_ and right before _Freedom Magazine_."

"No hidden agendas there, I guess," Frohike muttered.

"My students at the 300 level and up study modern history, the twentieth century and post-World War II in particular. My specialization is information dissemination," he said. "Specifically, information created and distributed by the government. What some people like to call propaganda."

"You _don't_ call it propaganda?"

"That's too simplistic a term, too easily dismissed. What our government does in fact is far more complex than mere propaganda. And," he paused, "given the events of the past year, what we're seeing now is absolutely unprecedented, even by those standards. It's been a fascinating avenue of study. I have several very promising students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Including Kate," he indicated the door, "who you've already met, of course."

"I see," Byers said, shooting Frohike a look that suggested he was doubtful about where this was going.

"I've lived and worked in D.C. for a long time now. I have a lot of friends and acquaintances who work in government. Because of what I do, people tend to pass along tidbits, anecdotes, things like that. 'Another one for the Big Brother file, Reg...' Well, I'm sure the two of you know what I mean."

"Sort of."

"Over the past few months, I've had this feeling... The mood has changed abruptly. People aren't laughing about my 'Big Brother' files anymore."

"With respect," Byers began, "I'd suggest that the whole country feels that way right about now-"

"I didn't call you here just because of my bad feeling," Moncrieff said with perfect humor. "That would be silly. I have a friend at Immigration. He's been hearing talk of this new security agency being proposed. It has him a little nervous, so he asked me to look into it. You know, see what the press is saying, that sort of thing."

He slid an open file across the desk.

"The agency is designed to be aligned with FEMA and Immigration, among other existing agencies. Sort of a way to tie all the threads together and work across the old bureaucracies. They claim that, in the wake of 9/11, they're trying to develop a more effective system for sharing intelligence."

"That actually doesn't sound like a bad idea..." Frohike began.

"It's not. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's desperately needed. The agency itself isn't the problematic part. Doing a little digging, beyond the politics, beyond the stated aims of the agency... that's where things start to get weird."

"How weird?"

"Not terribly at this point. But there were enough pieces that don't quite fit that I decided to keep an eye on it. See, we're talking about a program that has yet to be approved by Congress, but they're already preparing the infrastructure. Without a budget. Where's the money coming from? There's also this," he said, smoothing yet another file open in front of them.

"Press releases?"

"Yes, from various government agencies over the past four months, all of them announcing the reassignment of key personnel to a new, as yet unnamed, project." Moncrieff paused. "I think they're gathering these people together, quietly of course, from various top secret programs. People who specialized in counter-terrorism, R&D, domestic security in the late '80s and early '90s. We're not talking about official appointees. They're being brought in as consultants, loosely tied to classified projects, laying the groundwork."

"What for?"

"That's the question, isn't it? I don't know. That's why I came to you. Superficially, it all seems to lead back to this new security agency, but at this point there isn't much of a paper trail. Just rumors, personnel shifts. It isn't much."

"And you think we can find out more?" Byers asked, looking skeptical.

"You clearly have access to more highly-placed sources than I do-"

"Yeah. Sometimes. These days our access is... less accessible," Frohike said, unsuccessfully trying to suppress the thought of whatever the hell was going with Mulder at the moment. "But still, we can try."

"So you'll look into it?" Moncrieff asked, his expression caught somewhere halfway between relief and excitement.

"We'll look into it," Frohike said, standing up.

Byers twitched slightly, as though he wanted to protest.

"We'll look into it," Frohike repeated firmly. "No promises, though."

"Here." Moncrieff handed Frohike a file. "I made copies of everything."

Kate the grad student looked up from grading papers as Moncrieff let them out of his office.

"It's 3:30, Reg. You're going to be late. You won't make it across campus in time unless you leave now."

"What would I do without her?" he said with a distracted smile, grabbing a satchel from a hook on the wall and shaking both of their hands as he hurried out.

Byers turned to catch the door before it closed, but Kate stopped them.

"Reg is a good guy, you know." She stood, stacking papers neatly on the desk and moving out from behind it. "He's a true believer, in this ideals of this country, in standing up for the little guy. He also believes in the basic goodness of other people." She smiled sweetly at each of them in turn. "I, on the other hand, don't. People suck."

"And your point is?" Frohike asked.

"Just a friendly warning that if you're playing him, I'll probably spot it before he does."

"Hey, he called us, sister-" he began.

Byers interrupted him. "We may be many things, Miss-"

"Grey," she supplied.

"We may be many things, Miss Grey. But we're truthful about what we stand for."

"I hope so." She watched Byers for a long minute. He didn't look away.

"You know, I didn't actually believe you guys existed," she said at last, walking over and holding the door open for them. "I thought you were just clever pseudonyms for some disgruntled government employee."

"Well, you're half-right, kid," Frohike said. "We've got at least one former federal employee on the payroll."

"And yet you put your actual, real names on the things you publish," she said, scrutinizing them both as though they were a particularly intriguing logic problem, "making you extremely kill-able if you were ever to stumble onto something truly controversial."

Ignoring her implication that they'd yet to publish anything significant, Frohike said, "We've got to put our names on it, kid. People don't believe in anonymous sources anymore."

"Oh, yeah? Tell that to Deep Throat."

"You mean Ben Stein?" he deadpanned. "Were you even born yet when Watergate happened?"

She stifled a laugh as Byers grabbed him by the sleeve and propelled him toward the hallway.

"This has been extremely educational," she said, still smiling, and closed the door behind them.

* * *

Byers' first thought when he reached the address he'd found in his Sunday issue of the _Times_ was that there had to have been a communications breakdown of the worst order. He parked the van in the lot of a strip mall in suburban Potomac, amid the SUVs and mini-vans, and found himself standing outside a KidZone. KidZone was one of those immense indoor playgrounds -- the last refuge of paranoid parents, afraid to let their kids play outside. All the play was supervised, safely inside, away from kidnappers, cuts and scrapes or harmful UV rays. All the edges were rounded off, even the floors were padded. The automatic door slid open while he was standing there and he thought his eardrums might shatter from the unholy din inside.

Yves had to be mistaken – or out of her mind.

He went in, though, afraid to linger too long at the window, lest one of the mothers decide he was a friendly neighborhood pedophile and call the cops.

He had trouble locating Yves at first, among the track-suited soccer moms and BabyBjörn-wearing dads. She was sitting at one of the low tables, watching the children play with the same slightly lost expression he used to see on Susanne's face when she thought no one was watching. She'd taken care, once again, to blend in with the surroundings: her hair pulled back, wearing jeans and a t-shirt, the unremarkable uniform of a young suburban wife. She had her chin propped on one hand, the other cupped around a kid-sized hot chocolate.

"Yves?" he said, coming up behind her. "It's me."

"And I was expecting a tall, dark, handsome stranger." She turned to face him.

He ignored that, pushing a discarded pizza pan aside and taking a seat next to her at the table. "You were supposed to contact me over a week ago."

"Things got complicated." She shrugged.

"Complicated how?"

"In ways that don't have anything to do with you."

"Family matters?" he said, and was both shamed and a little vindicated to see her flinch.

"I know you think you understand, that you know who I am," she said flatly, "but you don't."

They lapsed into an uncomfortable silence.

"Just for the record?" he said, after a long moment, hoping to change the subject. "This is a horrible place for a clandestine meeting."

"Nonsense," she replied coolly. "It's perfect. No one can overhear us, certainly," she gestured around at the general din, "and anyone who notices us will think we're here with little Mackenzie over there." She waved at a dark-haired little girl climbing the ladder of a hot pink plastic slide. The girl waved back.

"Accomplice of yours? You're recruiting them awfully young, aren't you?"

"She's a sweet little girl. I told her mother she reminded me of my little sister."

"And she bought that?"

"Parents love to be told that their children are precious." Yves smiled at him, but it didn't quite reach her eyes. "Would you care for a drink? They have hot cocoa, Pepsi Cola or Kool-Aid."

"What flavor is the Kool-Aid?"

"Purple, I think."

"No thanks. I'll pass." He leaned his elbows on the table. "So, what have we got?"

"I have a way to get us into the Federal Detention Center, but there's something I need you to do for me..."

"Hi, Lily." The little girl who'd waved at Yves was standing at the end of their table. "Can I have my soda?" She pointed at a pink and lavender to-go cup near Byers' elbow.

"What do you say, Mackenzie?"

He turned to look at at Yves. She was smiling at the little girl, the expression on her face softer than he'd ever seen it.

"Please?" Mackenzie said.

Byers smiled, picked up the drink and handed it to her.

"Is he your boyfriend?" she asked frankly, regarding him with wide dark eyes.

"He's a friend, and he's a boy," Yves replied, looking obscurely amused.

Mackenzie continued to stare.

"Well," Yves prompted, "introduce yourself. This is John."

"Hello," he said, feeling a little awkward.

His dreams about that perfect, unattainable American existence had always included children. Abstractly, anyway. In reality, they made him slightly uncomfortable. Children were fragile, complicated little creatures, full of questions he couldn't quite bring himself to lie in answer to.

He'd been an only child, of course, and a quiet one at that. Too sensitive for good sense, his father used to say. As an adult, he had little interaction with kids. Almost none of his friends had them, and Meg had been skittish about the subject, no doubt guessing (rightly) that he wouldn't have made a particularly reliable prospective dad. Those dream children had always been blond and blue-eyed, anyway, not looking much like either Meg or him.

Mackenzie grinned at him, then turned and headed back toward the slides with a wave.

"Lily?" He turned to Yves, as Mackenzie scampered away. "Another anagram?"

"Something like that."

"So what is it you need me to do?"

She smiled at him, but it was her usual, restrained smile, not the genuine one she'd had on her face while she was watching Mackenzie.

"I just need you to talk to some people, have some paperwork prepared." She paused. "And pick out a nice suit. I'd suggest a blue tie, silk maybe. It works with your eyes."

"What? No high-tech gadgets? No breaking and entering?"

"Not this time. Maybe next time, if you're a good boy..." He could never quite tell when she was laughing with him and when she was laughing at him. "This time, I have a better way."

"Which is?"

She paused significantly. "Do you know any lawyers?"

* * *

He drove past Meg's house three times that afternoon before he gathered together enough guts to actually stop and knock on the door.

He couldn't help thinking of it as her 'new' house, despite the fact that she'd been living there since they first separated. He'd only been inside twice. The first time he'd shown up there, Meg had kicked him out unceremoniously and served him with divorce papers the very next day. Granted, he'd been heroically drunk and begging her to take him back – it hadn't been one of his finer moments. The second time had been in 1995, three days before Christmas. He'd been moving out of the townhouse in Vienna and into the building in Takoma Park with Langly and Frohike. Cleaning out the attic, he'd found a box of Meg's things: old photos from high school, from college, of her family, flowers pressed between the pages of thick books of poetry, a lace handkerchief, the ticket stub from a U2 concert. The remnants of a younger, softer Meg, one who'd been able to look at him without that mixture of loss and bewilderment on her face. Once he found the box, he couldn't stand to have it in the house any longer than he had to. It smelled like old paper and Love's Baby Soft and apple-scented hairspray. He'd driven the thing over to her that night. She'd invited him in for coffee, a clear peace offering, but he'd declined and gotten the hell out of there as fast as he could.

Needless to say, given past precedent, he wasn't expecting this to go particularly well.

He knocked twice before she came to the door, looking through the peephole to see who it was. For a long moment, he was afraid she might not open it at all.

"John," she said, pulling the door wide. "What are you doing here?"

She was barefoot, in blue jeans and a white cotton tank top, her hair pulled back from her face. She clutched a book in one hand, marking the page with her index finger.

"I'm sorry to bother you at home. It was on the way back from-" he faltered.

"Oh. Well. It's not that I'm sorry to see you... just, maybe you should call first? I mean, next time."

"I think I was afraid that if I waited to call, I'd find an excuse not to."

"Oh," she said again.

There was an extended pause.

"Come in," she finally said, motioning with her book. "Do you want, you know, coffee or tea or anything?"

The house didn't look anything like the one they'd lived in together. That house had been new, with thick carpets and matte eggshell walls. This one was a turn of the century cottage, with window boxes, hardwood floors, and a wide fireplace in the living room.

"I'm fine," he said, sitting down on a squashy, slip-covered sofa. All the furniture in their old house had matched: tailored, beige twill pieces his mother had helped pick out. "Thanks for asking, though."

"Okay," she said, sitting down herself. "So, why did you come here?"

"I need your help with something."

Meg blinked. "My help? You're not being indicted, are you?"

"No," he said. "It's not like that. Not entirely like that, anyway. I do need a lawyer for this, though..."

But she was already shaking her head.

"Meg, please." He leaned toward her. "You know I wouldn't ask if it weren't important."

"Actually, I don't know that. I don't know that at all. In fact, for all I know, this is part of some half-cocked plan to prove that a young Karl Rove leaked the Pentagon Papers, or something equally ridiculous..."

"It isn't."

"So you say."

"Because it's true," he said, a little annoyed.

"Okay, then," she said, "what is it about?"

When he hesitated, she said, "Please don't lie to me, John. Not if you want me to help you."

"I'm working on something, something that has to do with people who've been detained by the federal government." Not the entire truth, but not technically a lie. "They won't let journalists in, but they will allow observers from human rights organizations in. I need a lawyer who's willing to file all the proper paperwork."

"You don't work for human rights organization."

"No, but a friend of mine does." A friend of Yves', strictly-speaking, but he wasn't especially inclined to worry about the semantics.

"And why can't this friend have the paperwork filed?"

That was a good question, one he'd asked Yves himself. He hadn't gotten a particularly satisfactory answer.

"Because this is my project," he said instead. "Because this person is already going out on a limb to do me a favor."

"And you want a favor from me now, as well." Meg chewed slightly on her lower lip, looking thoughtfully at him.

"I trust you, Meg. That's why I'm asking."

"I'm going to make some coffee," she said, getting to her feet. "Are you sure you won't have some?"

"Sure. I will, if you're going to."

He followed her into the kitchen. The kitchen was pleasantly cluttered, done haphazardly in terra cotta and pale greens, and smelled vaguely of oatmeal cookies. Meg turned her back to him and started going through the rituals of making coffee.

"This is a nice house," he said. "I'm not sure if I've ever told you that before."

"No, you haven't." She switched the coffeemaker on and turned to face him.

"Well, it is."

"Do you really still live in that warehouse?" she asked. The coffee began to perc and bubble in the machine.

"Yes, we do."

She shook her head. "I can't even begin to imagine you in a place like that."

"It's cozier than it looks from the outside."

"A lot of things must be," she said, giving him an unreadable look.

They lapsed into silence again.

After a moment, he said, "Are you going to help me or not?"

"No." She sighed heavily, crossing her arms over her chest. "I won't do it. If you're up to something illegal, I could get disbarred. I won't risk that, not even for you."

"Meg-"

"_I_ won't risk it, but I might be able to put you in touch with someone who will."

That answer was actually better than he might have hoped. He stayed for a cup of coffee, something he probably should have done when she'd offered seven years before. He tried not to regret that decision as he was driving back to Takoma Park. If he ever let regret in, if he truly started to think about all the tiny choices, all the split-second decisions he'd made over the years, he'd never stop second-guessing himself.

Jimmy's new car was illegally parked in the alley when he got home, and the scent of food greeted him when Langly opened the door.

"Hey," he said, a slice of sausage pizza dangling from his mouth.

Funny how neither Langly or Frohike seemed to mind Jimmy's presence as much when he showed up bearing pizza and chicken wings.

He followed Langly into the kitchen, where Frohike and Jimmy sat amidst of pizza boxes and scattered papers. Catching sight of Byers, Jimmy brightened up considerably.

"Hey, man!" he said, slugging Byers on the shoulder a little harder than was strictly necessary. "Have some wings."

He handed Byers a plate and a Snapple iced tea, remembering to add a squeeze of lemon without being told.

"Where've you been all day?" Frohike sounded vaguely put-out.

'Meg's," which, once again, was only a half-truth, but those seemed to be coming to him more easily lately. It must have been Yves' influence.

"What's that?" he said, pointing at the papers Frohike was sorting through, in an attempt to change the subject.

"A little background on our new friends."

"And which friends would those be?"

"The good professor and his girl friday. Check it out." Frohike settled back in his chair and began to read, "Reginald Moncrieff was born in 1960 in New Hampshire. Let's see... Working class family, both parents now deceased. Put himself through college by bartending... Apparently, he was the first one in his family to actually graduate from college. Nothing out of the ordinary there. He was married briefly while he was a post-doc student at Cornell. No kids. She left him. He didn't take it particularly well. He took a leave of absence and bummed around South America for a year. Not a bad idea, if you ask me," he said, with a significant look at Byers. "Dr. Moncrieff lives out in Prince William County, alone except for an English sheepdog named Betsy. Well, you know what they say about people and their pets..."

He shuffled the files around. "And then there's Katherine Grey. Born August 20, 1977. Her father's retired Navy; he served in the Gulf. Mother's a part-time General Education instructor at Olympic Junior College. It looks like little Katie was the perfect kid: sports, clubs, awards, scholarships. Oh, and look at this! She was Poulsbo, Washington's Junior Miss in 1994. That's precious. Graduated summa cum laude in '99 with a BA in History, and now she's on the fast-track to her PhD at Georgetown."

He looked up. "You realize that these two are probably the most above-board and respectable subscribers we have, right?"

"So you think we can trust them? That we ought to pursue this story?"

"I don't know about trusting them, but the story's intriguing."

Langly tossed him a dry erase marker, which Byers caught with fingers stained with wing sauce.

"Mark it on the board, already."

Byers got up and walked over to the white board where they kept track of all their ongoing stories. He was writing in Reg Moncrieff's tip and assigning different aspects of research and fact-checking to each of them when he became aware of someone hovering over his shoulder.

"You're on here, Jimmy," he said without looking over. "I've got you working with me on press coverage."

"I'm he'll really appreciate that," said the very un-Jimmy-like voice behind him. It was Langly.

"Sorry. I just assumed. You're both tall."

"Yeah, but I take up less space." Langly leaned against one of the desks, a Mountain Dew in one hand. "You think this is a real story?"

"It certainly sounds like it could be."

"So, uh, what's with you and the wife?" Langly said. "You don't even mention her name for, like, five years and all of a sudden you're spending cozy Sunday afternoons together."

"She isn't my wife anymore, and it isn't like that. We're just trying to be friends again. She went through a lot because of me – I owe her that much."

"Okay, man. It's not like I have a whole lot of experience with that sort of thing... I just wondered."

There was a long pause.

"Is it making you, you know, happier?" Langly sounded uncharacteristically vulnerable, his voice low so the others couldn't hear. "Having somebody, even just as a friend?"

Byers opened his mouth to answer, not at all sure what to say, when a crash from the other room interrupted.

"Jimmy, I swear to God..." they heard Frohike say, followed by a stuttered apology from Jimmy.

Langly sighed heavily, but for once didn't make a snide remark.

"He's-"

"Too damn big for this place," Langly finished, but appeared to let it go, walking back over to Frohike and helping Jimmy stack blank CDs back on the spindle.

Frohike rolled his eyes, folding pizza boxes and smashing them into a jumbo-sized black garbage bag.

"Okay. Somebody needs to take out the garbage."

"I'll do it," Jimmy said.

Frohike watched him go with an odd expression on his face.

"What is it?"

"I was just thinking about that time we went down to New Orleans to bail Mulder out." He grinned. "Remember Officer Cecilia? Que linda."

"Didn't she put you in handcuffs?" Langly said. "And not in the good way?"

"That she did." After a moment, Frohike's grin faded. "How sad is it that I've started to think of those as the good old days?"

"Things seemed less complicated then, I guess."

Byers looked from one to the other. "And you're blaming Jimmy for that?"

"At least Mulder didn't break things," Langly said.

Byers gave him a look.

"Much."

Frohike sighed. "Besides, I'm not blaming the kid. He's just kind of a symbol of how much things have changed for us. If Yves were still around, I think I'd probably feel the same way about her."

"Funny you should bring her up," Langly said. "Somebody hacked into the FBI's counterterrorism database last week. Rumor is, the job had her fingerprints all over it."

"So, what?" Frohike said. "You think she's about to turn up again after all this time?"

"Could be. We'd better be prepared in case she does."

They looked at each other, and then at Byers, who remained resolutely silent on the subject.

* * *

Reg Moncrieff turned out to be an enthusiastic source of information. So enthusiastic,in fact, that the boxes of files, photos, tapes and reports he'd managed to accumulate were apparently already threatening to swamp his limited office space. About a week after their initial meeting, a mildly exasperated Kate Grey called and left a message, asking if someone could come collect some of the materials.

Jimmy showed up just as Byers was trying to coax the van's engine to life on less than a quarter of a tank.

"Jimmy!" Byers jumped out of the van and jogged over to the car, where Jimmy rolled down a window. "How do you feel about a trip over to Georgetown?"

"Sure." He revved the engine.

"Fantastic. Let's go," Byers said, opening the door on the passenger's side and getting in.

The outer office was empty, but unlocked, and they could hear voices coming from the other room. A female voice, speaking quickly, rose and fell behind the closed door. Byers could pick out the words "crackpots," "respectable researcher" and "tenure" but nothing of Moncrieff's response.

Boxes were stacked up against one wall, blocking the path to a storage cabinet and threatening to topple over at any moment.

"I think those are what we're here for," he said, leaning slightly against the door to Moncreiff's office and knocking tentatively. "Would you mind taking a few down to the car?"

"Lifting heavy boxes?" Jimmy said softly. "This is what you wanted my help with?"

"And sorting through everything once we get it home," Byers said with a sudden stab of guilt.

"Sure. Okay." Jimmy nodded and went to rescue the most precariously-placed box.

Byers knocked again. The door opened and Kate peeked out.

"Oh, it's you." She opened the door a little wider. "Did you come to pick up those files?"

"Yes. Thanks for the call." He paused, feeling a little awkward. He wondered briefly if she knew he'd overheard some of her conversation with Moncrieff. "That's a whole lot of files."

"I may have gotten a little overzealous," Moncrieff said from inside. "Come on in."

"I sent one of my associates down to the car with a box or two already. I hope that's all right."

"Yes," Kate said. "That's great. Please take it all. I nearly lost a toe yesterday."

Moncrieff waved Byers to a chair. "I'm glad Kate called you. I have some new information to show you as well."

"Aside from the six boxes full of files?"

"Yes," Moncrieff said, sitting down himself and rummaging in a drawer. "I just got these this morning..."

"Well, if you gentlemen will excuse me." Kate edged toward the door, reaching behind her back for the doorknob.

"Stay, Kate," Moncrieff said. "Please."

"I can't. I have seminar."

"Not for another hour..."

"Well, I want to get coffee first. At this time of day it'll take at least twenty minutes to get through the line and get my latte." Her gaze flicked to Byers. "Sorry."

She slung her bag over one shoulder and headed for the door.

Once she was gone, Moncrieff said, "My research assistant thinks you're a bad influence on me."

"That's understandable. Many people aren't ready to hear about the things we've uncovered."

He smiled. "Kate's a pragmatist. She reminds me that I need hard facts to back up my ideas. It's a good quality in an assistant." He paused. "I think she gets a little worried about me, too. I can be a bit, um, obsessive.'

"Who can't?"

Moncrieff grinned at that.

"Here we go," he said, finally pulling a stack of glossy photos from the desk drawer. "A photographer at the Post took the first few at a press conference last week. The others are older, but they're all of people associated with this classified project."

Byers reached across the desk and began to sort through the pictures. Most of them were fairly boring, candid shots of suit-wearing government types unveiling a logo, fielding questions from journalists. When he got to the bottom of the pile, though, he stopped short.

One of the photos contained the very last thing he'd expected: a familiar face. Two, actually. His breath caught in his throat.

"Where did you get this?" he asked, picking up the photo.

"From my friend at INS. I'm not sure when it was taken, though." Moncrieff got up and stood over his shoulder. "Did you find something?"

"Maybe. Maybe not. I know these two – or, at least, I did," Byers said, tapping his fingertips against a grainy black and white image of Grant Ellis and Susanne Modeski. "They were R&D -- weapons research, chemicals, behavior modification, really nasty stuff."

"And you think they might be involved in this new agency?"

"I doubt it," he said grimly. "They're dead."

"Oh."

Byers leaned over the photo again and indicated a dark-haired man whose face was slightly obscured by a lens flare. "Who is that with them?"

"Dunno. I could ask Steve, though."

"Your snitch at the INS is a guy named Steve?"

"He isn't a snitch. He's a concerned citizen, and an old friend of mine from high school." Moncrieff took the photo from Byers and flipped it over. All that was written on the back was 'White Stone, 1996.'

"In the meantime, can I keep this?" Byers asked.

"Yeah, sure. Keep them all."

"Hey," Jimmy said from the doorway, "I don't think we're going to be able to fit all those boxes in my car. I managed to fit three of them in the trunk, though."

"That's okay, Jimmy," Byers said, motioning him into the office. "I can come back from the rest of them in a day or two. It'll probably take us that long to sort through the first batch anyway."

Moncrieff got to his feet and leaned acroos the desk. "I'm Reg Moncrieff, by the way." He extended a hand. "Nice to meet another of the brains behind _The_ _Lone Gunman_."

Jimmy made the slightest of faces at the characterization, but didn't say anything.

"Jimmy Bond." He shook Moncrieff's hand heartily.

Byers swept the photos into a manila envelope and tucked them under one arm. Jimmy didn't know much about Susanne, and he didn't feel like going into the whole story here in front of Moncrieff.

"Are you ready, Jimmy?" he said. "Let's go."

* * *

Jenna Clifford had mall hair, a thick New Jersey accent and didn't look or act remotely like any other lawyer Byers had ever met.

"So," she said, sitting down behind her desk, "you're the dreaded ex-husband." She leaned forward, scrutinizing him from underneath her impressively permed bangs. "I was expecting someone slightly-"

"More insane?" he put in helpfully.

"Beefier. You know, more of a Lifetime Television, deadbeat dad type."

"Meg gave you the impression that she and I had the sort of relationship that might have ended with someone setting a bed on fire?"

Jenna grinned. "Nah. She doesn't talk about it _at all_, and I admittedly have a bit of an overactive imagination. She's so sweet and patient, I guess I just automatically cast her as the long-suffering wife."

That part was true at any rate. His expression must have said as much, too, because Jenna's face softened abruptly.

"I'm an asshole," she said. "I didn't mean to dredge up anybody's ancient history. Sorry." She got up and poured them both cups of hot, black coffee. The mug she handed Byers had _The Daily Show_ logo printed across the front in bright blue.

"So Meg says you need help. Something a little... out of the box?" She made a face and took another drink of coffee. "God, I hate that expression."

"It's apt, though," he said. "I completely understand if you'd rather not get involved. Meg didn't want to." Her refusal bothered him, even though he'd had no reason to expect her help.

Jenna laughed. "I have a bit of a reputation for, shall we say, pushing the envelope. As long as it isn't completely against the law, I can probably handle it."

"One of my associates and I need to get in to see a federal prisoner. We have a contact at a human rights group who's agreed to help us out on that end, but we need a lawyer to file all the appropriate paperwork."

"That's it? And Meg wouldn't do it for you?" She seemed surprised. "If there's anything else, Mr. Byers-"

"John."

"Fine. If there's anything else going on here, John..."

"You want to know up front. I get it."

She shook her head. "No, you don't. If there's anything going on here that I don't know about, anything illegal, I want you to keep it that way. If I knowingly help you in the commission of a crime and you get caught, I get disbarred. At best." She leaned forward. "So what I'm saying, John, is that what I don't know? I can't be compelled to testify about."

"All right." He shook his head. "You're the first person in recent memory who's encourage me to lie to them."

"Not lie. I just don't want you to volunteer anything. Can you do that?"

"I can do that."

She smiled at him. "Then I'll file all the appropriate motions. I should have something for you by Tuesday."

* * *

The next time he went to Moncrieff's office, Byers brought coffee.

Kate was at her desk when he walked into the office. She didn't seem _quite_ as unhappy to see him as before. A small improvement, but a welcome one. Her hair was loose this time, in slightly messy waves around her face. She looked up, pushing a lock of it out of her face, and took off her glasses.

"Hello again. Did you come for the rest of those boxes?"

"Yes, and to see Reg, if possible."

She hesitated, looking as though she was going to refuse to let him in.

"I, uh, brought coffee," he said, awkwardly holding a cup out to her.

She looked at it a bit suspiciously. "Are you trying to buy me off?"

"Maybe a little," he said honestly, and was relieved when she began to laugh.

"Well, you're very good at it. The way to my heart _is_ through caffeine." She reached out and took the cup from him. "I'd half-decided to lie and tell you that Reg was in class the next time you showed up."

"Only half?" He sat on the edge of the desk and took a drink of his own coffee.

"The very small part of me that thinks Reg might not be a complete eccentric kept interfering."

"So I get to go in?" he asked. When she hesitated, he indicated the coffee. "I compromised my principles to get that. It ought to be worth something."

"Why? Starbucks trying to take over the world?" she laughed. Then, "You're not kidding, are you?"

"Corporate interests around the world engage in underhanded tactics and unfair competition to the point of..."

She looked mildly offended. "They use Fair Trade beans, you know."

"Let's just say that, given the choice, I prefer to support small local businesses."

"When I was a kid, Starbucks _was_ the little, local coffeeshop on the corner," she said, shaking her head, "not the focal point for some vast conspiracy to force everyone to drink overpriced coffee and listen to digitally remastered jazz."

"Branding is insidious. You study propaganda, you ought to know that already."

"Sure." She leaned back in her chair and took a sip. "But it's a long way from Rupert Murdoch or White House talking points to gourmet coffee."

"Not as long as you probably think."

She was quiet a moment, then said, "How do you function, Mr. Byers?"

"It's John, and I don't," he said.

She shook her head again. "Well, Reg is right in the middle of preparing for a lecture series, but I think I can let you in just this once." She hefted her latte. "Just as thanks, for compromising your principles and all."

He heaved himself up off the desk. "Thanks."

"John-"

He turned and looked back at her.

"Next time bring scones and I'm all yours."

He must have blushed a little, because she gave him a knowing smile and turned back to her computer.

He felt vaguely guilty for some reason. It was just an off-hand comment, after all, an innocent (not entirely serious) flirtation. Normal people did this all the time. He'd forgotten how.

He was beginning to suspect that Frohike was right, he thought as he knocked on Moncrieff's door, women were bad news.

* * *

They met for coffee in the morning, about three hours before they were scheduled to be at the prison.

Starbucks was threatening to become a recurring theme in his life.

Yves took his arm and gently steered him into line with all the other suit-clad yuppies, clutching stainless steel travel mugs and waiting for their early morning caffeine fixes. Yves blended in as usual, in a severe black suit and carrying a slim, leather briefcase. He noticed she ordered her latte with nonfat milk, as though maybe she actually had to work at it a little to squeeze into those Emma Peel catsuits of hers. It was one of the only self-consciously stereotypical feminine things he'd ever seen her do. He wasn't sure, though, if it was authentic or just part of the button-down façade she was projecting that morning.

"Just coffee," Byers said to the barista, and steeled himself for the by-now familiar dance of deciphering which blend, how large and whether or not he wanted room for cream.

He felt rather than saw Yves turn away, moving from her place beside his shoulder.

"He's here," she said, walking away and leaving him to gather up his cup and lid to trail along behind her.

Yves' contact was a handsome, dark-haired man in his late twenties, wearing a navy blue suit and a gold wedding band. He greeted Yves in Arabic, clasping her hands, then extended a hand to Byers.

"Hanif Hussain," he said. They shook hands. "I'm with Amnesty International."

"John Byers."

"Yves' told me about you. It's nice to finally meet you."

They found a table in a far corner, away from the crowded entrance.

"What exactly has Yves told you?" Byers asked. She certainly hadn't bothered to mention what, if anything, she might have said about him.

"That you're a journalist. That you're interested in seeing justice done, in telling the truth." Hanif paused. "I don't know whether you'll see anything today that will be helpful for you, but the more transparent we can force the government to be, the better."

"But surely they don't know who I really am?" Byers glanced over at Yves. "Right?"

"That's right. It's simple investigative journalism, John. You've been undercover before," but she said it without any of the exasperated sarcasm he'd come to expect from her. In front of Hanif, her manner was entirely different than he'd ever seen before. She was friendly, deferent, all her hard edges smoothed over.

"Yes, plenty of times. But generally I know what my cover story is beforehand."

"That's easy," Hanif said, sliding a manila file across the table. "You're fellow observers. We're simply there to ask some questions of a high-value prisoner, make sure he's being treated fairly. You don't have to say anything if you don't want to. I can do all the talking. Mostly you're just there to watch."

"But Naser will talk to us, right?" Yves said, softly. "That was part of the deal."

"Yes, he'll talk."

Yves and Hanif exchanged a look that set Byers' survival instincts tingling. There was something else going on here, something the two of them weren't letting him in on.

He ought to have known. This was Yves, after all, and she never did anything without an ulterior motive.

"Who exactly is this Naser? And why do you want to talk to him?"

"Hassan Naser is a suspected terrorist, possibly with al-Qaeda connections," Hanif said, "though that part is up for debate. The FBI thinks he was trying to set up a terrorist training camp out in Montana."

"And you don't think so?"

"It doesn't really matter. He may be guilty. I may even think he is. What's important is ensuring that he receives a fair trial, on the evidence, not because of the current social climate."

"Isn't that risky for you," Byers asked, "given the current climate?"

"Radicalism is a serious social problem, across cultures," Hanif said. "People have every right and reason to be concerned, to be angry. It's what we do with those emotions that matters. It's important that cooler heads prevail, you know? We can't lose our perspective, or our values. To accomplish that, I may have to take some personal risks. I accepted that a long time ago."

His cell phone rang and he looked down at the display.

"I have to take this. Excuse me," he said, flipping open his phone and heading for the door.

When they were alone, Yves said, "What do you think of him?"

"He seems… idealistic."

She smiled. It was one of her rare, genuine smiles, but a little sad. "I thought you two might get along."

"Did you?"

She took a sip of her fat-free latte, the first he'd seen her take since they sat down. "Hanif believes that by preaching love and pacifism, by ensuring justice and fairness for everyone, that he can eradicate the root causes."

"But you don't believe that."

"I believe it might work, in a perfect world. But the world we have is far from perfect."

"That's just a convenient excuse to do nothing," he said, "to never have to take a stand. It makes it easy to pretend there's no clear difference between good and evil."

She gave him a look that he couldn't quite decipher. "I believe in evil, Byers. But the most powerful force in the world isn't good or evil, it's self-interest."

"What's really going on here, Yves?" he said abruptly. "You're up to something, and if I'm going to put myself on the line, I think I have the right to know-"

"You're getting what you want," she said shortly. "So don't complain. We'll walk right past her cell on our way in. You can confirm it's her, scope out of the lay of the place." She turned toward the door, where Hanif had just re-entered, tucking his cell phone in a jacket pocket. "Just try not to be too obvious, all right?"

Hanif drove an American-made car, a big, oil-gulping Buick with a chrome grill and leather bucket seats that hinted at Detroit's long-past glory days.

The detention center was just off the beltway in Virginia, far from the residential neighborhoods but close enough to Langley and the CIA for convenience. The prison was squat and grey, partially visible from the road between the trees. As they drove through the first of several security checkpoints, he could see Yves in the front seat, tying a dark blue scarf over her hair.

"A gesture of respect," she said, catching sight of him in the mirror and anticipating his question.

Inside the center, there was even more security, which was probably to be expected. Byers couldn't help wondering, though, if the heightened measures were in place because of the grey-area status of so many of the prisoners being held there.

"We're with Amnesty International," Hanif said, giving a guard one of his business cards. "You should be expecting us."

The guard scanned over a list on his clipboard. "Uh-huh. I'm going to need to see some secondary I.D., though, Mr. Hussain." He put a slight, possibly unconscious, emphasis on Hanif's surname. "From the other two, as well, please."

Another guard came forward and held a hand out to Yves, who unfastened her briefcase and placidly produced the fake documentation she'd prepared that morning. Her I.D. listed her as one Della Weer, originally of Sacramento, California. Yves managed the accent fairly well, too, flattening out her vowels and adopting the slightly staccato, questioning lilt native to the West Coast.

Byers' own freshly made driver's license and passport said he was Jon Wilson, 35, of Bethesda, Maryland.

"We're going to need to see your birth certificate, too, Mr. Hussain," the first guard was saying when Byers looked up again.

Hanif frowned, digging his birth certificate from his briefcase.

"I was born and raised in Detroit, you know," he said, handing the document over with the air of someone who was slowly becoming resigned to that sort of treatment.

The other guard's gaze skimmed over Yves' headscarf, but he handed her identification back without comment. They scrutinized Byers' I.D. pretty heavily, too, so it was possible that the posturing was more to express dislike for Amnesty International in general. Either way wouldn't have surprised him much.

"This way."

They walked through the maximum security area. All the prisoners were kept on lock-down, apart from one another and hidden from view. It gave Byers a sudden shudder of memory, thinking about Texas and being alone in the dark with the taste of blood in his mouth.

In theory, of course, men and women were kept in separate facilities. But where better to hide a prisoner the government wasn't supposed to have than someplace she wasn't supposed to be? The documents they'd found (that Yves had found) said she was here, at the end of this block. He'd thought that if he could just figure out where she was, a way to save her would present itself. _That's how the A-Team did it_, Jimmy's voice echoed softly in his head. Somehow, though, now that he was here, he didn't think that approach was going to work.

They reached the end of the block and rounded the corner. All he would have to do to confirm Susanne's presence was turn to his left...

His breath stopped in chest. The cell was empty.

Somehow they made it the rest of the way to the secure room where Hassan Naser was waiting for them, but Byers wasn't aware of it. He hoped Yves was paying attention in case they had to get in or out in a hurry.

"Remember," the guard was saying as he unlocked the door, "anything and everything you say in here will be recorded. Audio and video, so behave yourselves, okay?"

Hassan Naser sat, his hands folded politely, at the far end of the table. When Hanif introduced himself, Naser responded in Arabic, his voice clear and articulate, his manner entirely engaging. Even through the language barrier, Byers could tell that Naser was incredibly charming and persuasive. Yves had a look of intense concentration on her face, as though she had to work hard to keep up with the gist of the conversation. For his part, Byers didn't understand anything past the greeting.

"In English, please," Hanif said, glancing from Yves to Byers to the security camera above the door. "Just to make sure everything stays out in the open." He paused. "Are you being treated well?"

"I'm locked in a cage," Naser said. "What do you think?"

Hanif made a note on a legal pad, but kept asking questions.

"I can't imagine," Naser said after several minutes of this, "what you hope to accomplish."

"I want to help you."

"There is no helping me this way. There's no helping any of us."

"You'd rather, what?" Yves said, speaking for the first time. "Blow up supermarkets? Kill schoolchildren?"

Naser turned to her. "I did not say that. There are those, though, who see that as the only way left to them."

"What you did in Morocco?" she said. "Was that the only way you had left?"

"I thought you were here to help me," Naser said, sitting back and scrutinizing her.

Yves leaned across the table. "Hanif wants to help you. I just want to know where your money came from. I want to know where you got your equipment."

"What money?" he asked, casting a look at the camera.

"Fine. You don't want to talk about the money? We won't." She paused, leaning even closer and lowering her voice. "Tell me about Khwaja al-Jafari. You met with him in Cairo last year."

Naser's expression didn't change at all. He just watched her for a long moment.

"Now I know who you are," he said, with the slightest of smiles. "It's illuminating to have finally met you."

"No doubt," Yves replied coolly.

"I saw Khwaja in Cairo. It was entirely social, though." Naser paused. "He looked well, if you wanted to know – and he did mention you briefly, now that I think about it. He wondered where you'd gotten to after you left Boston." There was another pause. "Now I know."

"Too bad you won't be able to tell him," she said, straightening up.

"Oh, I won't be in here forever..."

The door opened, cutting him off. "Time's up. Let's go."

Naser smiled at her again before shuffling out, flanked by two guards.

Byers chanced a look at Yves, her expression was curiously blank. She looked entirely collected as they gathered up their things and were escorted back to the main security checkpoint.

They walked past the cell again on their way out. This time it was occupied. The woman inside was thin, her light brown hair lank and her eyes cold. She looked at Byers as he passed, their gaze locking for a moment. The despair in her expression sent a chill through him.

She was also very clearly not Susanne.

"That's not her," he whispered, numb with shock. Yves turned sharply to look at him, then, catching herself, looked forward again.

"It isn't her," he repeated.

"Don't say anything else," Yves warned softly, putting a hand on his elbow.

Hanif dropped them near the Springfield metro station, miles from either Yves' car or the Starbucks where they'd met that morning.

"Thank you," she said, taking his hand.

"Did you get what you needed, Yves? Did it help at all."

"It did," she said, with a slight glance at Byers. "For both of us, I think."

Byers shook his head, but managed to take Hanif's hand and thank him properly. Once the car pulled away, though, he leaned against the archway that led down to the metro stop.

"Did you plan this?" he asked, finally. "Is that the reason you said you'd help me?"

"I saw an opportunity, so I took it," she said. "I could have easily done this on my own, Byers. I certainly didn't need you for it. But when the situation presented itself..." She shrugged. "It made sense to do things this way. No matter what, at least one objective would be accomplished. As it is… we're both one step closer to what we want. Win-win, as they say."

She stepped onto the escalator and he had no choice but to follow. A gust of air, tinged with the scent of grease and free-floating electricity, blew up from the station below.

"Why don't I feel much like I won today, then?"

"Would you rather have gone on thinking she was being held in there? Now you can move on to a new avenue of investigation."

"I can?" he said, feeding his ticket into the turnstyle. "Or we can?"

"I'll still help you, if that's what you're asking."

"But you're only helping because it relates to something you want to investigate yourself. Don't you ever want to do something simply because it's the right thing, Yves?"

She didn't answer for a long moment. "And what makes you think that what you're doing is the right thing?"

"It just is. I know it in my heart."

"Well, good for you then," she said. "I don't have nearly those sort of instincts."

The platform was nearly empty, the crush of the early commute ending around 10 a.m. There were a few college students waiting for the Blue Line, a few harried day camp counselors trying to keep their charges in line with nametags and plastic jumpropes. Otherwise, though, the station was eerily quiet as the lights along the track began to flash, signaling the arrival of a train. Yves chose an empty car and stepped inside. He followed, sitting beside her on one of the hard plastic seats. The doors closed behind them and the train lurched to a start.

"I do admire good people," she said, turning to stare out the window. "I just don't have the luxury of being one."


	4. RunAround

In this installment... sex and Chinese food in Missoula, a death occurs under suspicious circumstances, Byers gets arrested, Yves stalks Jimmy (But she's not jealous. Really. She's _not_. Shut up.), shocking ineptitude with a side of actual conspiracies and law enforcement officers abuse the Patriot Act toward their own ends.

**3. Run-Around**

Summary: "I've still got this dream that you just can't shake."

_I still got this dream that you just can't shake_

_I love you to the point you can no longer take_

_Well, all right okay_

_So be that way_

_I hope and pray_

_That there's something left to say _

He had the white picket fence dream again.

Two days after meeting with Hassan Naser and discovering that Federal Detainee #10013 was not, in fact, Susanne, he woke up shuddering and sweat-soaked, the taste of sand and ashes in his mouth.

He hadn't had that particular dream in almost three years.

He hadn't dreamed it since a few months after Las Vegas, since Susanne had given him a ring and an almost-promise. More to the point, he hadn't dreamed it since they started sleeping together.

The reality of them had been better, more vital and more complicated than the dream version. It had hurt more too, but, more importantly, it had satisfied him. It had given him something to strive for, something to lose, for the first time in years.

The reality of Susanne wasn't sweet. She was never going to wear a sundress and wait for him by the maple tree in the backyard. She was harder, smarter and sadder than the version of her he'd dreamed about for ten years, and he loved her for it.

She had a grim sense of humor, and the right side of her mouth quirked oddly when she laughed. She was focused and determined, she could be cold and hard, but he lived for the little glimpses of something softer and warmer underneath. He liked the idea that he was the only one who got to see those flashes of the woman she used to be.

He didn't want to start dreaming about her again. He didn't want to start remembering her as a metaphor.

They were never going to have that perfect life together, and the truth was he wasn't sure he even wanted it anymore. He wasn't sure that life could deliver what it promised. Slowly, over these past few years, he'd stopped believing there really was a better way.

New York had been the final blow, the crisis moment, the tipping point. He was really going to have to start dealing with that, but he couldn't think about New York in any kind of detail, not yet. It was still too painful in ways that were about more than just Susanne. So, instead, he thought about the time before that.

They should never have seen each other again, and both of them knew it. Surprisingly, meeting had been Susanne's idea, not his. He would have walked away, never seen her again, never spoken her name again, if it meant she stayed safe. He would have given her a life without him if it meant she could be happy.

He didn't think too much about what it meant that she hadn't done the same for him.

Once she asked him to, of course, he'd come running. She would call and he would drop everything to meet her, in a succession of bad motels in Tempe, Lodi, Charlotte and a half-dozen other cities.

In May, four months almost to the day before New York, he flew into Spokane, Washington, rented a car at the airport and headed east on I-90. Lake Coeur d'Alene fell away on either side of the interstate as he headed toward the Fourth of July Pass, its deep, glacial waters glinting in the sun. The passes were mostly clear, the melt well on its way to the Columbia or the Snake rivers.

He was enthralled and a little intimidated by the sheer scale of the American West. He'd grown up in Northern Virginia and gone to college in Maryland, places that, while occasionally quietly beautiful (at least once you got away from the rampant suburban sprawl) weren't exactly known for their dramatic geography.

The first time he'd ever seen so-called 'real' mountains, he got a little dizzy. Driving through the Idaho panhandle and into Montana was no different. I-90 was braced by peaks and cliffs and places where the road seemed to drop away into nothingness. He found himself taking his eyes off the road, looking out at the rocky riverbanks and giant western hemlocks.

Montana's 'big sky' was more than just a clever tourism slogan. The city of Missoula had been settled in a broad valley, the grasses on the surrounding hills already turning golden-brown despite the fact that it was still the middle of spring. The sky hung low and wide over the valley, ice blue and looking so close he almost felt he could reach out the driver's side window and touch the clouds.

He followed the blue 'lodging' signs to a Comfort Inn just off the interstate. The motel had to have been at least twenty-five years old and was surrounded by gas stations on almost every side. The desk clerk inside greeted him cheerfully, though. The lobby area looked shabby but clean, the smell of singed coffee wafting from the bulk urns in the lounge.

"I have a reservation for this evening for Novac," he said.

"Yes, of course," the desk clerk said, tapping keys on her circa-Windows 95 computer. She couldn't have been much more than eighteen. "Your wife left you a key. She got here earlier this afternoon."

"That's perfect. Thank you," he said, smiling.

She returned the smile. People were so open and trusting in this part of the country. It almost made him feel a little guilty.

"Sure thing, Mr. Novac. Enjoy your stay."

The lights were off in Room 117, save a small lamp on the night table. Susanne was sitting on the bed, the ugly motel comforter already turned down. She was barefoot, her face freshly scrubbed and her hair slightly longer than the last time he'd seen her. She started to her feet as he opened the door.

"John-" She flung herself at him, practically knocking the wind from him. The door slammed shut behind them and he dropped his bag to the floor.

"Hey." He brought his arms around her and pulled her close. She was trembling slightly. "Hey."

"I missed you," she said, reaching up and kissing him hard.

Caught off guard, he lost his balance and they fell back against the door. She had his coat and tie off before he'd even caught his breath.

"I guess so," he said, when she finally let him up for air.

She didn't reply, just kissed him again and started unbuttoning her blouse. She took his hands in hers, pulling him with her. They left a messy trail of clothing between the door and the bed.

It had been months since they'd seen each other. But, even still, he hadn't anticipated this kind of reception.

"Hey," he said softly.

"Don't talk." She kissed him again. "Not yet."

It didn't really take much convincing to get him to shut up.

The sex was raw and hurried, a little desperate and over far too quickly. Susanne didn't seem to mind, though. She shuddered underneath him, arching her back and calling his name softly.

He lay there for a few minutes afterward, a little stunned, until he felt her sit up and swing her legs over the edge of the bed.

"Are you all right?"

She went over to where her suitcase was thrown open and fished out a cotton tank top.

"I'm fine," she said, pulling it over her head. She leaned down, grabbed his discarded boxers and put those on, too. His stomach did an entirely pleasant somersault.

"I'm just fine," she said again, coming back over to lie down beside him. He reached up and put an arm around her. "I'm just glad I have-" _someone, anyone..._ "you," she finished, leaning her head against his shoulder and not looking him in the eye.

He loved her and she needed him. That was how this thing worked; it had been from the beginning. It wasn't perfect, but it was better than the alternative. It was better than a decade of nothing but dreaming. He'd accepted the slightly unequal nature of their relationship -- or, at least, he thought he had. But that didn't explain why he was lying there, next to a content and sleeping Susanne, staring at the ceiling and wondering why he felt so unsettled.

He got out of bed, trying not to wake her. She didn't even seem to notice he'd gone, just turned onto her side and hugged the pillow with both arms.

The shower in the tiny bathroom was cramped, he kept knocking aside the plastic curtain whenever he moved and spraying water onto the floor. The water was so hard he actually felt dirtier for having washed with it, a residue of hotel soap, salt and metal stayed on his skin even after he toweled off.

Susanne was awake when he emerged from the bathroom, sitting cross-legged on the bed, the Yellow Pages open in front of her and the phone resting in its cradle on the nightstand. She looked up and the expression on her face when she saw him went a long way toward banishing his moodiness.

"I ordered Chinese," she said, smiling at him, and suddenly all was right in the world again.

* * *

Strolling through the main campus at Georgetown, Frohike began to wonder if he'd missed his calling as a professor.

The Potomac was, in his opinion, one of the uglier rivers in the country. The water was flat and a dirty grey-brown, with a permanent haze of humidity hovering just above the tree-line on either bank. But the students still treated it like Daytona Beach. Swimsuit-clad girls rode jet-skis across the water. The women's crew team rowed past, in navy blue shorts that showed off their tanned legs.

"Coeds," Frohike said with a grin. Byers just sighed, almost inaudibly. "Aw, come on, buddy. Are you trying to tell me that all these lovely twenty-somethings don't make you feel young again?"

"If I were ever to find myself involved with a much younger woman," Byers said seriously, "she would have to be fairly exceptional." He had this faraway look in his eye and Frohike imagined that he was probably remembering a younger Susanne Modeski, a girl-genius who'd gotten her PhD from Cornell at the tender age of twenty-three. "Lovely and twenty-something isn't enough for me. It wasn't even when _I_ was twenty-something."

"So, okay. Susanne? Sure. But the former Mrs. Byers? She was exceptional, too?"

"Yes," he replied, and didn't elaborate.

Frohike was learning to hate the history building like you wouldn't believe. Reg Moncrieff seemed like a good guy; he was certainly an enthusiastic one. He'd provided them with a whole lot of information, more, maybe, than they actually needed. That was part of the problem. They'd spent the better part of two days sorting through all the data he'd given them, highlighting important passages and possible patterns.

That was the reality of what they did. For every computer hack and high-tech B-&-E job they pulled, there were a couple hundred hours of digging through de-classified papers, sifting through abandoned web pages and running from expert to expert gathering information under false pretenses.

Not exactly the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters.

Plus, this time, he had a hunch the story was going nowhere. Byers, though, seemed reluctant to give it up, probably for some reason he wouldn't share with rest of the group. That seemed to be pretty much par for the course these days.

Moncrieff's office was locked, but his research assistant was there, struggling down the hall toward them with an armload of books and dressed in a plaid skirt and knee-socks she must have stolen from Alicia Silverstone circa-1995. Or, more likely these days, Marcia Brady circa-1975. Papers were fluttering out of the messenger bag she had slung across one shoulder. A fat volume of essays slid off the top of the stack and hit the floor.

"Here let me get that for you," Frohike said, bending down to retrieve the book.

"Thank you!" she replied, leaning out from behind the books to smile gratefully at whoever had rescued her. She stopped, mid-smile. "Oh, it's you guys. What are you doing here?"

"We need your boss to shed some light on some of the info he gave us." He held out a hand to hold her books while she unlocked the office door. She ignored him.

"Oh, yeah? Good luck with that." She struggled with the keys, balancing the books on one hip, flipping the key ring onto her index finger and jamming the key into the lock.

"You changed your hair, Kate," Byers said, because he was that kind of guy.

One distracted hand went to her hair, causing the books to shift dangerously, and Kate actually smiled at him. "You're the first person to notice."

"It's very nice," he said, and held the door for her.

She went over to the desk and put down her huge stack of books. "Reg should be right back. Did you want coffee or anything?"

"Sure." Frohike watched her fiddle with an ancient Mr. Coffee. "You don't like us much, do you?"

"It isn't that." She looked up, then over at Byers. "It's like I said before, John, I just worry about Reg. And, frankly? I've been reading your paper for over a year now. I'm not convinced that you guys are on the right track."

"What makes you say that?"

She poured the coffee and looked sidelong at Frohike. "Your cover story this month implied that the CIA faked the USS Cole bombing."

"Hey, you have no idea the kind of elaborate schemes our government gets up to-"

"You'll have to excuse my incredulity, but I have a hard time buying that our government -- the same government that can't do anything about its out-of-control pork barrel spending, overcome intra-agency squabbling long enough to protect us from terrorists or even appear to find its own ass with both hands most of the time -- is organized enough to pull off something like that."

He and Byers exchanged a look. Byers smiled tightly and said, "But that's the beauty of it. Where better to hide a conspiracy than behind a facade of ineptitude?"

"That's one hell of a facade, then," she said, bringing three coffee cups over to the desk. "Are you sure it isn't the other way around? That the government lets these conspiracy stories and urban legends grow legs, just to distract people from their shocking ineptitude? You've got to admit, alien abductions and CIA assassinations make for a much sexier story than cronyism and ineffectual legislation."

Frohike grimaced. "I'm thinking it's actually probably a little bit from Column A, and a little from Column B."

"Shocking ineptitude with a side of actual conspiracies?" She shrugged. "That you might actually get me to buy."

Byers frowned, taking a seat on the edge of the desk and invading her personal bubble a little more than was strictly necessary. "We're just trying to wake people up to how vulnerable they truly are, to get them to look at the world in a different way."

"Think about all the things you take for granted," Frohike said. "Like traveling. Every time you take a plane or a train somewhere, you're on camera. Your bags get searched. Anyone with access can see where you're using your credit card and how much you spend. You stay at a hotel... you're completely available to anyone who wants to watch. Housekeeping is in and out of your room. Most hotels have transparent security surveillance now. And that doesn't even take into account all the ubiquitous things around you; things that could easily be vessels for secret surveillance."

She moved away from Byers, sitting down behind the desk and sliding her glasses off. Byers was right. She'd cut her hair. Frohike never would have noticed on his own, not in a million years.

"What? You mean like a pay phone or a Gideon Bible or something?" she said, and Frohike experienced a moment of intense deja vu.

He was still shaking it off when Byers replied, "Yes, exactly like that."

"But what about the people who actually _read_ those Bibles?"

"Kiddo," Frohike said, "do you know anyone who's ever actually read one of those things?"

"You mean like in a non-ironic way?" She grinned at him. "But if you mean, do I know people who've opened one up? Yes, I do. No electronic devices that I could see. Though, granted, it was Spring Break and there was tequila and a game of 'I Never' involved, so..."

"Nice to see kids these days taking their educations seriously. How the hell did you even manage to get in to graduate school?"

"You'd be surprised," she said, looking amused. "I got my undergraduate degree at a state school that was generally more well-known for its sixty year Rose Bowl dry spell and the fact that it topped _Playboy_'s list of the twenty all-time party schools than it was for academic achievement." She paused thoughtfully. "Also for producing journalists and cheese."

"Cheese?" Byers echoed.

"Cheese, journalists. Who can tell the difference, really?" Frohike said, finally cracking a smile. She was growing on him.

"I was a journalism major, actually, until I did a summer internship at a twenty-four hour cable news network that shall not be named. I came back home, switched into the history department and minored in mass comm and propaganda studies." She took a sip of coffee. "So I do get what you're saying. I'm just not prepared to go as far as you have. I'm not even prepared to go as far as Reg does."

"Not yet," Byers said quietly. "But if you'd seen the things we have..."

"Then? Maybe." She gave Byers a shrewd look, the kind that meant she already had his number. Admittedly, figuring Byers out wasn't that hard -- particularly, for some reason, for the female of the species. "Or maybe I'll just hope it never comes to that."

"I wouldn't go tempting fate like that, if I were you," Frohike quipped.

Byers, though, was scrutinizing the kid with an expression on his face that reminded Frohike of something, he just couldn't quite figure out what.

"Tell me there's coffee," Reg Moncrieff said, pushing the door open. He, too, was weighed down by a large stack of heavy books, his glasses askew and an impressive cowlick of dark hair sticking up on the back of his head. Between the cowlick, the spectacles and his ill-fitting corduroy jacket, he looked vaguely like one of the Lost Boys from _Peter Pan_.

"There's coffee," Kate replied smoothly, standing up to fetch him a cup, "and you have visitors."

"Do I?" He pushed his glasses back into place. "Oh, so I do. Hello."

Kate handed him a fresh cup of coffee, and Frohike couldn't help noticing that she squeezed Moncrieff's wrist slightly with her free hand when she handed it to him.

"Where have you been all morning, Reg? The dean's been calling."

"I'll just bet he has," Moncrieff said with a smile. "I declined an invitation to lunch with the university president."

"Reg..."

"I _politely_ declined." He squinted at Kate through his glasses. "Maybe you should go. You clean up well."

She rolled her eyes. "With a smooth line like that, how can I say no? Let me know when and where and I'll go."

"Come on into my office," Moncrieff said, taking a drink from his cup and gesturing toward the door.

"Why exactly did you tell the dean you couldn't make lunch?" Kate asked, refilling her coffee mug and following him into his office. "Just so we have our stories straight..."

"I'm the middle of writing up a review of Donald Lewis' article on Cold War-era efforts by the KGB to produce EMP weapons powerful enough to influence weather patterns in specific target areas."

Kate snorted. "That's not classified government information. That's the plot of a James Bond movie."

"You keep believing that, kid," Frohike said.

She just laughed and he found himself wondering vaguely if, in twenty years or so, there would be a generation of college kids who looked back at the War on Terror the way kids today saw the Cold War, regarding it as some sort of amusing kitsch: the province of campy spy movies and overwrought t.v. shows starring Keifer Sutherland.

He actually kind of hoped there would be.

She made a couple notes on a yellow legal pad, then said, "All right. I think I'll leave you boys alone to talk about grassy knolls and Soviet superweapons."

"Call Greenpeace for me, will you?" Moncrieff called after her. "They have a whole archive of Soviet-era watchdog files..."

She waved an assent and closed the door behind her.

"So," Moncrieff said pleasantly, gesturing them both to seats, "what can I do for you now?"

Frohike exchanged a look with Byers, and began, "So, the thing is... we're not finding much to go on with this case of yours..."

"Actually," Byers interrupted, "we were wondering if it might be possible for us to speak directly with your friend at the INS."

_Oh, really?_ Well, that was the first Frohike had heard of that plan.

"I'm sure he'd be happy to meet with you, but I don't really know what help he'll be."

"I need to know more about that picture he gave you. The one from New Mexico."

_New Mexico?_ A tiny but insistent alarm bell went off in the back of Frohike's mind. If this was about Susanne (and, face it, what _wasn't_ with Byers) they were potentially in very big trouble. No amount of convincing was going to keep him from following this story through to the end -- or until he got himself killed, whichever came first.

He brooded over this latest development all the way through their conversation with Moncrieff and back to the car. When Susanne had disappeared again after 9/11, without even so much as a 'Dear John' (pardon the pun), he'd secretly been relieved. He liked her, he even felt sorry for her most of the time, but the truth was the woman meant nothing but trouble. Usually trouble for Byers, of the very personal variety.

And for some reason, trouble of the personal variety made him think of the weird vibe he'd noticed between Dr. Moncrieff and Kate.

"So, do you think she's sleeping with him?" he said, breaking the silence. His words echoed around the parking garage, louder than he'd expected them to be.

"What?" Byers said, clearly surprised and probably a little offended. "Who?"

"Kate and the good professor."

Byers gave him a look.

Frohike shrugged. "I got that sense."

"Even if it were true, I'm not sure why it would be any of our business..."

"I like being aware of all the variables. It's plausible, too. It would hardly be the first time a professor took a more than scholarly interest in one of his students. And all that mother hen business about not trusting us...? I'd say that's highly indicative."

"I don't think it's like that," Byers said, frowning.

"Oh, yeah? Why not?"

He shrugged. "I just have a feeling."

"Oh, yeah. 'Cause your instincts about women are _stellar_."

Byers made a face. "Just get in the car, Frohike."

* * *

On the way back from his first meeting with Jenna Clifford, Byers had driven past Meg's house. It wasn't that he was checking up on her exactly, he'd just felt a sudden, insistent urge to make sure she was all right. She'd been fine, of course, but that hadn't stopped him from cruising by occasionally during the following week or so. Somehow he couldn't quite shake the vaguely guilty feeling that by involving her, however slightly, in whatever was going on with Yves, he'd put her in danger.

Besides, her house wasn't that far out of the way.

He dropped Frohike off at the office, making a vague excuse that Frohike clearly didn't buy for a minute, and headed toward Meg's neighborhood. After the divorce, they'd both ended up in Takoma Park -- but in very different parts of town. Meg had moved there first, largely because she'd initially been the one to move out. In Byers' case... Well, he probably wouldn't have picked the town himself, but Langly and Frohike had already been living there.

Meg lived in one of Takoma Park's historic districts. The houses were nicely appointed, well kept up and affordable. At that time of day, her neighborhood was quiet. Most people were still at work, and since the area trended toward singles and younger couples, there weren't a whole lot of kids around. The houses stood silent for the most part, with their tiny patches of lawn and flowers in their window boxes, nothing out of place – except, of course, for the dark blue sedan with government plates parked at the end of the street.

He parked the van hastily on the next block over, jumped out and started to run. He cut through a  
well-groomed backyard, a neighbor's cocker spaniel yelping excitedly at him as he vaulted over the fence into Meg's yard. He ducked around the side of the house, found the spare key just where he'd expected it to be and let himself in the kitchen door.

"Meg?" he called. "Meg, are you here?"

He ran through the living room and into the back hallway, calling her name. He'd opened the door to the bedroom, noticing incongruously that the only thing she seemed to have kept from their old house was the 800 thread count Calvin Klein duvet set his mother had given her as a shower present, when the front door opened.

He froze.

Meg was on her cell phone as she walked in. He heard her voice, but couldn't quite make out the words. He heard the jingle of keys as she dumped them onto the table in the front hallway.

Her voice became more distinct as she walked into the kitchen. "I wish I could, Jack, but not tonight. I have to be in court first thing tomorrow and-"

She stopped abruptly. Byers eased the bedroom door open a crack and chanced a look out. Meg was staring at something just beyond the kitchen window.

"Oh, tell me he isn't out there," she said softly. Then, recovering, she said into the phone, "Oh, nothing. It's nothing. Remind me to tell you about it sometime. By then hopefully it will be a funny story."

There was a sharp knock at the door. Meg sighed heavily.

"There's, uh, someone at the door. I have to go- I know. Me, too," she said, and hung up.

The front door creaked open and he heard her say, "Oh. I was expecting somebody else."

Byers shifted positions behind the bedroom door, trying to get a view of whoever Meg was talking to. When he finally managed it, his worst suspicions were confirmed: two men in dark suits stood on the front steps.

"Megan Halliday?" One of them flashed a badge. "We'd like to ask you some questions about your husband."

"I'm not married," Meg said mildly, surprisingly cool-headed under the circumstances.

The agent flipped open a notebook and frowned at it. "Excuse me. Your ex-husband. One John F. Byers. Have you seen him recently, Miss Halliday?"

"We're friendly enough. We have lunch together about once a month."

"And when was the last time you actually saw him?"

"What is this about, Agent...? I don't believe I caught your name."

"I'm Agent Lloyd, and this is Agent Shelby. We're with the Federal Bureau of Investigation."

"That much I'd guessed," Meg said dryly.

"So you're telling us that you haven't seen Mr. Byers recently?"

"I didn't say that. I didn't say anything, actually, and I don't have to. Unless, of course, you're going to arrest me?"

Agent Lloyd frowned. "I feel it necessary to remind you that this is a matter of national security."

"If I see John, I'll make sure he knows you're looking for him." She smiled and firmly shut the door on them, then turned and leaned against it, closing her eyes and appearing to be trying to gather herself together. He considered walking out into the living room and letting her know he was there. He reached for the doorknob and it squeaked slightly. Meg's eyes flew open.

"You can come out now," she said. "I know you're here, John. I saw your van outside."

He emerged from the bedroom. The van was, in fact, clearly visible from the kitchen window. "Hi, Meg."

"I'm not even going to ask how you got in." She paused. "Actually, on second thought, I'm _totally_ going to ask. How did you get in here?"

"You still leave a spare key under the citronella turtle. I checked because I thought it was worth a try."

"Oh. I guess I'm going to have to stop doing that."

He felt a momentary flash of annoyance. "It's not like I'm going to stalk you or anything."

"I didn't mean it like that…" She shook her head. "Come on into the living room."

He followed and sat beside her on the sofa. "I'm sorry for just walking in, but I saw those two agents snooping around and wanted to make sure you were- Well, I decided it would just be easier to wait inside."

"Why are they looking for you?"

"I don't know." He looked over at her: her expression registered disbelief. "I really don't know."

"You don't know because you haven't done anything wrong? Or you don't know because it could be one of any number of illegal things?"

"There are things it could be, yes. And it's not as though it would be the first time I've been questioned, either."

"There was a time," Meg said, not looking at him," when the prospect of a parking ticket made you nervous."

"Times change," he said simply, staring down at his hands, knowing there was no way to make her understand.

She didn't say anything for a long moment, but he could feel her watching him. After a minute, she said, "Why are you here, anyway? Did you need another favor?"

"No, I came by because I was worried."

"Worried about what?" She sounded exasperated. He knew that tone well. "That I might die of boredom here in my safe, well-lit, middle class neighborhood?"

"I just thought-" He paused. "I worried about my coming here the other day, asking for your help. I was afraid that I'd exposed you, put you at risk-"

"That's a load of crap," she said shortly. "I know who you are, what sort of things you get yourself involved in, and I still wanted you back in my life. So quit playing the martyr already."

"Meg-"

"I'm serious," she said. "If I didn't want you around, I'd have kicked you out as soon as I realized you'd broken into my house. Or, better yet, I would have turned you over to those FBI agents. Because, did I mention? You _broke into my house._"

"Well, I didn't actually break in since I used the key..." he began. Then, at a look from her, he amended, "But I appreciate the sentiment. Look, I know you think I'm crazy, but I do have good reason for worrying about your welfare."

"I'm not the one with the FBI after me."

"You have to trust me on this. This isn't the first time we've been surveilled, and if they're watching us, then they're probably watching everyone we know. Please, just promise you'll be careful."

"Go home, John," she said, standing up.

He stood as well. "Fine. I'm going. But promise me."

"All right, all right."

There was a long, awkward moment while she waited expectantly for him to take his leave.

Instead, he said. "So, what's going on with you and this Jack guy?"

She pushed him toward the door.

"Out. Now."

* * *

Frohike liked to imagine that nothing could surprise him anymore and, mostly, he was right. But then there were days... Like today, just for example. It was a Thursday, and he seemed to remember a wise man somewhere once saying that nobody ever got the hang of Thursdays.

"My hand to God, Jimmy," he was saying, after having to talk down a particularly cranky Langly -- cranky because Jimmy had woken them, in Langly's words, 'near the crack of dawn', "I wonder sometimes what goes through that head of yours."

"It's nine-thirty," Jimmy pointed out, not appearing fazed in the least. "Most normal people are at work by now."

If he was going to wake them up, the least he could have done was bring coffee. _Good_ coffee. A pot of Folgers was slowly burning on their ancient, industrial-sized machine, giving off a less than pleasant aroma.

"Byers called me at seven." He shrugged. "I just assumed."

"Yeah, well, Byers is crazy," Langly said, hefting the coffee pot.

Frohike turned back to Jimmy. "You were up at seven?"

"I'd been at the gym since six-thirty." He managed to sound ever-so-slightly superior about the fact, too.

"Sorry, kid. We don't get in much treadmill time around here. We were up all night trying to find a back door into the archives of this biotech start-up that's suing small farmers whose crops have gotten cross-pollinated with their patented, designer wheat."

"Why are you even telling him?" Langly said, handing over a cup of coffee.

"Were you able to do it?" Jimmy asked.

"No." And that was the other reason for all the bad moods that morning.

"That's too bad," Jimmy said. "Farmers have it rough, especially these days. I worked on a farm a couple summers when I was a kid."

"Yeah, me too," Langly said bitterly.

"It sucks."

"Yes, it does."

"My dad said it would build character."

"My dad owned the damned farm."

Jimmy made appropriately sympathetic noises, and Langly ceased hostilities long enough to exchange stories about how much they'd both hated milking cows and de-tassling corn.

"My dad finally let me quit after Derek lost a finger in the combine," Jimmy said. "It's hard to catch a football with only nine fingers, and a scholarship was pretty much the only way I was going to be able to afford college."

"I didn't get to quit until I turned eighteen and moved the hell out," Langly grumbled. "Maybe I should've learned to catch a damn ball."

Jimmy glanced at his watch. "Speaking of which, I've got to get going soon."

"You dropped by just to wake us up and then leave?"

Jimmy shrugged. "Byers told me to stop by after the gym."

No doubt to make sure they got up before ten, Frohike thought uncharitably, and, of course, the kid fell for it.

"Fox Sports is here doing a bunch of pre-season tapings for their Classic College Football halftime shows. They're only here in DC for a couple days and my agent got me a gig."

"On Fox?" Langly said. "Rupert Murdoch's insidious propaganda machine?"

"It's only Fox Sports," Jimmy replied reasonably. "And they're giving _me_ money, not the other way around."

"Sure. Blood money."

"Ease up, Langly," Frohike said, stirring creamer into his coffee. So much for the warm fuzzies of shared farmhand horror stories.

"Anyway," Jimmy said, "you guys are more than welcome to come to the taping. It seems slow here and it might be fun..."

"A bunch of meatheads congratulating each other on kicking a tiny ball through a big goalpost? Count me out."

Jimmy's face fell just perceptibly. Langly could be a real pain in the ass sometimes.

"Sure, kid," Frohike said, a little annoyed at having to be the nice one. Where the hell was Byers, anyway? "I'll go with you. I'm more of a basketball fan myself, but I watch a Redskins game every now and again."

"Great. I'm meeting my agent at eleven-thirty, so there should be time for you to grab a quick shower and get ready."

"I am ready."

"Oh." Jimmy blinked. "Well, let's go then."

When Jimmy mentioned meeting his agent at the studio, Frohike had pictured someone vaguely resembling Jay Mohr in J_erry Maguire_. In reality, though, Maile Carballo turned out to be in her late twenties and built like a professional beach volleyball player.

"Whoa," Frohike said.

"Be nice," Jimmy whispered and went to greet her.

"Hey, Jimmy." She smiled fondly at him. "How are you?"

"I'm all right. I'm ready to get this over with, though."

"Hello, there," Frohike said.

"Uh-huh," she said, looking right past him and back to Jimmy. "They're nearly all set, so we'll get you into your mic whenever you're ready." She frowned at his shirt. "I told you to wear blue."

"I didn't have a clean blue shirt."

She sighed. "You look nice in blue, Jimmy. You look younger, innocent, sympathetic. Like someone whose tragic yet compelling life story a major network would pay for the movie rights to. Listen to me next time. Come on. Let's get you into make-up."

"Not so much this time, okay?" But he allowed himself to be propelled toward a make-up chair.

Frohike watched -- not _too_ obviously, he thought -- as Maile walked over to confer with one of the producers.

"She played volleyball for University of Hawai'i, first team all-WAC three years running, broke all sorts of records." Jimmy grinned as the make-up artist dusted powder across his nose. "She could squash you like a bug, so behave yourself."

"Yeah. Sure thing." The girl was way out of Frohike's league, anyway. It didn't mean he couldn't enjoy the view, though. "Hey, she seems to like you, Jimmy. You ever, uh-"

"Maile doesn't get involved with her clients. Besides, you know it _is_ possible for a man and a woman to be friends without sex getting in the way."

_Ah_, Frohike thought, _the innocence of youth._ Or, maybe, you could just afford to be pickier when the girls were lining up to have your little future football stars.

Instead, Frohike just shrugged. "She seems like your type is all."

Jimmy looked unusually thoughtful. Scary.

"What do you mean by that?"

"You know: dark, exotic-looking, a little ruthless, able to squash a man like a bug..."

Jimmy opened his mouth to offer a response, but then Maile came back over with bottled water and a crisply-folded blue shirt.

"Change," she commanded, handing him the shirt. He took it meekly. The make-up girl removed his smock, and he shrugged out of his white and grey striped oxford and put on the blue one.

"What's with the bodyguard?" Maile said, finally seeming to notice Frohike's presence.

"This is Melvin Frohike."

No reaction.

"Aw, come on. I've told you about Frohike. From the paper?"

"Oh, hunting and fishing. Right." She looked him over once, then promptly lost interest again. "The questions will be mostly about the '92 game, especially that last touchdown pass, and how you and Novacek were co-captains that year. Tell the story about the speech you two gave before the game, reporters love that one. And they may ask about what you're doing these days. Make sure to mention your charity work." She paused. "You good?"

"I'm good," he said, standing up.

"By the way, ESPN is in pre-production on a scripted NFL drama series. I'm in talks to get you, Bill and a couple of the other guys small guest spots, so I'll keep you posted."

"Maile, I can't act..."

"Neither can most of the people on the WB's fall line-up," she said briskly, twisting the cap off the bottle of water and handing it to him. "There's a specific episode they want you for, but I'll understand if you'd rather not do that one. I'll FedEx you the script this week and you can tell me what you think..."

"Ms. Carballo? Mr. Bond?" one of the clipboard-hugging associate producers was motioning at them. "We're ready."

"Go on, Jimmy," she said, winking at him. "Break a leg. At least it won't be skiing this time."

"Oh, you're hilarious," he said and headed over to the set to greet the sportscaster behind the desk.

The reporter shook Jimmy's hand and offered him a seat. They chatted for a few minutes before shooting got underway. Frohike made himself scarce as the set got quiet and the director called for action.

"All right," the reporter said. "Welcome back to FSN Classic College Football. We've been watching the 1992 Nebraska-Iowa State game. Talk about a classic upset. Here in the studio with us today we have former Cyclone wide receiver Jimmy Bond, who caught that game-winning touchdown pass in overtime..."

Frohike had to admit, Jimmy made for a good interview. He was engaging and friendly, told stories with enthusiasm, looked like everybody's All-American. The camera loved him. No wonder his agent wanted him on regular t.v.

"You were quite the promising talent for the Giants until the playoffs in '97..." the reporter was saying.

Jimmy's expression changed just slightly, but he spouted off some innocuous answer about learning a lot from the coach and offensive line being 'just like family.'

The reporter frowned slightly too, but moved on to another question.

Meanwhile, Maile looked livid, she grabbed the associate producer by the arm and hauled him out of range of the microphones.

"He can't ask about that," she said. "That was part of the deal. No questions about '97. It's been talked to death..."

"All right, all right," the producer muttered. "We'll edit the question out, if you want. Your boy fielded it well, though. Besides, you can't blame the guy for trying. It was a big deal story."

"A big deal story that my client expressly said he won't discuss with the media out of respect for the other players involved. If any of your people do something like that again, I'll pull _all_ my guys, got it?"

"Yeah, yeah. Fine."

She stalked back over to the craft services table where Frohike had stationed himself.

"What was that all about?"

"Reporters," she said angrily. "Ambulance-chasing vultures, the whole lot of them." She paused. "Well, present company excepted, I guess."

"If it bleeds, it leads," he said. "I've published a sensational story or two in my day." He looked over at her. "What happened in '97?"

"That's a question you ought to be asking Jimmy," she said, and didn't speak again until the interview was finished.

* * *

Langly was, without a doubt, one of the most talented programmers of his generation.

Or, at least, he had been. Once upon a time.

He'd never been particularly ambitious. He had trouble getting motivated to work on projects that didn't interest him. He had problems (big surprise) with authority. He was a good programmer, but a crappy employee. In short, he just didn't play well with others.

Even before he met Byers and Frohike, he hadn't been all that interested in getting in on the proverbial 'ground floor' of any of the late-80s software start-ups his fellow wunderkinds had made their fortunes launching. It wasn't that he hadn't had offers. He'd had plenty; he just hadn't accepted any of them. If he had, and this was the part he couldn't seem to stop thinking about these days, he might have cashed in some stock options, made a few mill and kept them in printer's fees and cheesesteaks for the rest of their lives.

Their current financial situation was, as far as he was concerned, all on him.

He'd worked off and on, at a tidy hourly consulting rate, throughout the boom during the nineties. But there hadn't been a whole lot of call for his services since the debacle at FPS, a situation he was trying desperately to change.

Luckily, he still had Phoebe.

Using the mightily generous severance package she'd gotten from FPS... Hush money, Langly had called it the last time he'd been out in California. But mostly because, as Phoebe rightly pointed out, he was just pissed that they hadn't offered him any. Using that money, Phoebe set up her own independent game design company. She was currently making quite a name for herself and her team, designing immersive, intensely plot-driven games, heavily influenced by film noir and Japanese anime. Their first three offerings had debuted to critical accolades and more-than-respectable sales.

She'd invited him out to San Mateo the previous year to check the place out, saying that he was one of the only guys at FPS who'd ever treated her like an actual person. He thought she was maybe overstating the case a little. No one had ever accused him of being a sensitive guy, or even a nice one most of the time. But he'd always liked her _and _he needed the work.

The staff at Robot Cowboy Games was different than any other high tech outfit Langly had ever seen. Young, hip, disproportionately female, most of them had grown up in a world where Bill Gates was emperor of all he surveyed, comic books were 'ironic' and geeky garage bands went platinum. In other words, to the children of the 1990s, not only did geekiness pay off, it had a certain cache.

Phoebe gave him the grand tour, through workstations manned by pierced skater kids and Bettie Page wannabes.

"So what do you think?" she said, reaching into a mini-fridge and tossing him a lemonade.

"I think you've got a good thing going here," he said, leaning against a table littered with concept art and character design sketches. "You should be proud."

"I'm looking for good programmers to keep on retainer. Your work is great, Langly. We can do contract-only stuff if you want, no commitments, nothing that would get in the way of your other work. I'm willing to pay well to keep good people on staff."

He took a drink of his lemonade. "No psycho ninja babes this time, right?"

"I promise, there's almost no chance of that."

"Almost?"

"Never say never, Langly."

"I'm glad to see someone got a laugh out of that disaster-"

"Hey," she said, "if I don't laugh about it, it'll just keep being too freaky to deal with. Okay?"

Of course he'd wound up accepting her offer and spent most of the summer of 2001 working on the game engine for a supernatural detective game about a string of cult murders in 1940s San Francisco. The game was due out in time for the upcoming Christmas. He'd already reserved a copy for Frohike. It would be right up his alley.

Phoebe called that morning at what must have been an insanely early hour Pacific Time. That made two mornings in a row he'd been woken up before ten.

"I've got another project for you if you have the time," she said. "We're having some trouble with the AI on our new strategy game."

"Sure," he said, cradling the phone against his shoulder as he rescued a Wi-Fi card from Jimmy's efforts at tidying up.

"Great. I'll send you the project specs and the code. We're having a status meeting Friday at 10 our time. We can video conference you in, if that works for you, and you can tell us what you found."

"Okay. Talk to you then."

He hung up, turned to replace the phone and nearly knocked into Jimmy and a can of Endust.

"Hey, Langly," he said, brightly. "What's up? Was that call about a new story?"

"No. I'm trying to generate some revenue so we don't have to-" Langly stopped, reconsidering before he said something he'd regret. A first, Frohike would probably have said had he been there. "Uh, it's just some work I do on the side."

Frohike was out talking to a lawyer for the USDA about their GMO wheat story, and Byers... Well, who the hell knew where Byers kept running off to these days. Normally, Langly tried to spend as little time alone with Jimmy as possible. It wasn't that Jimmy was a bad guy -- guys like him usually weren't, at least not on purpose. It was just that they didn't have a clue how obnoxious they could be. People had been telling them how freaking great they were since the day it became obvious they could throw a ball farther and harder than everyone else, so how could they possibly know? Guys like Jimmy were Clark fucking Kent, the letterman's jacket-wearing king of the prom, every father's favorite son. He really couldn't stand it; it just got under his skin.

So, yeah, maybe Langly still had some issues to work through. What else was new?

"Don't touch that!" he said, and Jimmy jumped nearly a foot into the air.

"Sorry."

The phone ran suddenly, and Jimmy jumped again, looking at Langly like maybe he thought that was Jimmy's fault, too. Langly sighed, switched on the tape and picked up the phone.

"Lone Gunman."

"Langly?" It was Byers, but he wasn't calling from his cell phone. It was a 703 number.

"Byers, where the hell've you been? We've barely seen you all week..."

"Look, I don't have much time, so you have to listen." Byers sounded uncharacteristically shaken. "I need you to try and pull together some emergency cash," he paused, "and call Meg."

"Your ex? Why?"

"Because I think I'm going to need a lawyer."

_Aw, shit_, Langly thought.

"What happened, man?"

"The FBI brought me in for questioning. I haven't been formally charged with anything but... Well, it doesn't look good. I think the only reason they allowed me a phone call is because I mentioned Skinner's name."

"They say what they want you for?"

"Not yet. But they've been looking for me. It's safe to assume they're watching the rest of you, too."

"Okay. Tell me where you're being held and the names of the agents in charge of the case. Oh, and what's the ex's phone number?"

Byers gave him the info and hung up. Jimmy was hovering right at Langly's elbow as he replaced the phone in the cradle.

"Byers is in trouble?" Jimmy said, looking truly worried.

"You'd better believe it," Langly said.

"I want to help. What can I do?"

"Not much, probably," Langly grumbled, but mostly to himself. "Yeah, there's something you can do. Go find Frohike. He can go down there and try to talk to the Feds... and if all else fails, he can call Scully."

"Uh," Jimmy looked hesitant, "why Frohike?"

"Because believe it or not, he's the respectable one."

"He is?"

"Well, actually, _Byers_ is the respectable one. But under the circumstances, Frohike is our next best bet."

Jimmy still seemed vaguely unconvinced, but did as he was told without another word.

Langly picked up the phone again and dialed Meg Halliday's work number. The Legal Aid receptionist seemed less than inclined to put his call through at first, until he mentioned that he was calling on behalf of one of Meg's clients. Well, a potential client, anyway.

After three rings, a not-entirely-unfamiliar voice said, "Megan Halliday."

"Uh, hi there. This is Richard Langly. I'm a friend of Byers'. I don't know whether you remember or not."

"I remember." There was a slight coolness in her tone.

Langly swallowed. His mouth suddenly seemed dry for some reason. "He, uh, wanted me to call you because he's run into a little legal trouble and wondered if you could h-"

"The FBI picked him up, didn't they?" she said briskly, totally disrupting his flow of thought.

"Uh, wha-? Yeah. How did you know about that?"

She ignored him. "Where is he being held?" Then after he told her, she said, "The soonest I can be there is in a couple hours or so. One of you should meet me, just in case. But don't, under any circumstances, actually talk to anyone official. Understand?"

"Yeah, sure." He paused. "Hey, uh, thanks for helping out and all."

"Just don't make me regret it," she said, and hung up with a decided click.

* * *

Frohike had only met Byers' ex-wife a handful of times over the years. But on the few occasions he had, he reflected, she'd mostly been wearing the same look she had on her face now. Back then that look had usually been directed at Byers or, on rare occasions, all three of them. This time, however, it seemed to be reserved for the two F.B.I. agents who'd brought Byers in.

As Frohike approached, Meg was arguing heatedly with a U.S. Attorney, while the two agents and a quiet man in a dark suit (who had the stink of the NSA all over him) looked on impassively. This had clearly been going on for awhile. Meg looked tired, her suit rumpled and creased, as though they'd kept her waiting in the reception area for a few hours. It had taken Frohike awhile to get there, too, but he'd expected her to have already been in to see Byers by the time he showed up.

"Either set a date to arraign my client, or release him," she was saying. Frohike decided to keep a discreet distance and try to look as though he wasn't listening.

"Actually, Ms. Halliday, under provision of the Patriot Act we can hold your husband- I mean, client," the son of a bitch actually smirked at her," indefinitely on suspicion of terrorism."

"Terrorism?" Meg said, looking appalled. "You can't be serious."

"Mr. Byers is suspected of providing material support to enemies of the United States." The attorney handed her a file. "I can assure you that everything is in order."

Meg flipped through the documents. "'Providing expert advice or assistance to enemies of the state'? You're kidding me, right? He publishes a newsletter."

"A newsletter that outlines, in a great detail, weaknesses in this country's infrastructure. The publication in question is filled with anti-government propaganda and incitement." He paused. "Mr. Byers is also a known associate of one Hayat al-Jafari, alias Lois Runtz, alias Yves Harlow."

"And Ms. al-Jafari is a terrorist?"

The F.B.I. agents exchanged a look. "Not that we can prove. Yet. But she is a person of interest."

"What exactly has she done?"

"That relates to a separate, on-going investigation. We're not at liberty to discuss that."

"If you've brought my client in to question him about this woman, you'd better start discussing it."

One of the agents held open the door to what must have been an interrogation room. "As I said, Ms. Halliday, we're not at liberty. There are about a dozen things we could question your client about. Ms. Al-Jafari's whereabouts and current activities are most definitely on the list, but that's all you need to know at this point."

They disappeared briefly into the room. Frohike scanned the corridor, making note of where the exits were in case they wound up having to make a hasty exit. He wound up taking a seat on one of the hard plastic chairs in the reception area. After a few minutes, several agents and the attorney came out, presumably leaving Meg alone to talk with Byers. About twenty minutes later, Meg came out of the room herself.

"I assume you have everything you need?" the first agent said, showing her to the reception area.

"For now." Despite the fact that the agent had a good eight inches on her, she somehow managed to convey the sense that she was looking down at him -- and didn't like what she saw. "I'll be back in the morning. I expect to find my client in good shape, Agent Lloyd."

"This is America, Ms. Halliday. We don't torture prisoners."

"Of course you don't."

Lloyd took off and Meg walked into the waiting area. Frohike jumped to his feet, setting down the copy of _Jane_ he'd been flipping absently through. It had Keira Knightley on the cover, so sue him.

"Meg!"

She stopped and turned to look at him. "Oh, there you are. I'd wondered."

"How's Byers?"

She took off toward the door and he jogged to catch up with her.

"He's doing well enough, considering."

"Considering what?"

"That he's in very, very deep trouble." She pushed the door open and headed out into the parking lot. "Look, Mr. Langly-"

"I'm Frohike," he cut in. "Melvin, if that's easier for you to remember."

"This is bullshit, Melvin," she said. "They're just looking for an excuse to hold him until they can find out what he knows."

"Knows about what?"

She gave him a look that actually made him flinch. "Whatever it is you three have gotten yourselves into this time."

"Except for once we haven't done anything." She looked sharply at him again. He raised both hands in surrender. "Swear to God."

"What's this about then? This al-Jafari woman they mentioned... who is she, Melvin?"

"Isn't that the question of the year?" he muttered. "We know her as Yves Harlow. She's a hacker, an occasional source of information. I know she has some sort of ties to Malta, Cypress, possibly Egypt... but a terrorist? No way."

Meg sighed. "It doesn't matter. If she's under investigation..."

"Her passport's British," he offered. "At least the one I saw was. I have no idea if it was really genuine or not. But if it was a fake, it was a damned good one."

"Okay. Thank you, Melvin. That's good to know." She sighed again and dug her keys from her bag. "I'll call as soon as I know something else."

"Shouldn't we... I don't know... be collecting bail money or something?"

"They aren't going to let him out on bail," she said, walking away from him and heading to her car.

"Where are you going?" he called after her.

"To call a judge, and possibly the ACLU."

* * *

If nothing else, Byers thought as he lay on an uncomfortable cot in his holding cell, this experience could lay the groundwork for a series of articles on questionable interrogation tactics in federal counterterrorism investigations. Assuming, of course, that they ever let him out.

His day had started off normally enough. He'd dropped Frohike at the USDA, but begged off actually going inside. Instead, he'd gone to try and run down the photos of all staff who'd been at White Stone in 1996, hoping to get a better look at the dark-haired man he'd seen with Susanne and Grant Ellis in that picture of Reg Moncrieff's. It was a long-shot, but after Yves' lead hadn't panned out, he was willing to take what he could get. Besides, he might also make some headway with the other information Moncrieff had given them. Two birds, one stone.

Unfortunately, he didn't make it far. He'd parked and begun walking to find the nearest Starbucks, reflecting that, in this one respect, maybe selling his soul wasn't such a bad idea. Their coffee really was almost as good as advertised. He was saved from a total crossover to the dark side, however, by the appearance of a Dunkin' Donuts. The actual doughnuts were usually somewhat iffy, but when it came to plain old coffee Dunkin' Donuts had Starbucks beat. Hands down. He ordered an extra large, with cream, no sugar, and got a free travel mug for his trouble.

"John Byers?" said a vaguely familiar voice, as he was taking his first sip. "We're going to have to ask you to come with us."

He turned around and came face-to-face with an FBI badge. Beyond it stood the two men who'd shown up at Meg's.

"Can I finish my coffee first?" he said.

"Funny," said one of the agents.

"Can I at least ask what this about, then?"

"There will be plenty of time to discuss that. Trust me."

_Oh, great. A threat_, he thought, but didn't say out loud.

They'd brought him to a holding cell and left him there for hours. He'd expected to be questioned immediately and was fairly surprised when he wasn't. After the first hour or two, though, he realized it was a tactic. They left him alone for the better part of the day, making him wait, anticipating, jumping every time someone walked past outside.

Finally, Agent Shelby came and took him into one of the interrogation rooms.

"You want coffee or anything?" he asked.

Byers declined, crossing his arms and leaning back in his chair.

"So, do you know why you're here, Mr. Byers?"

"I haven't the first clue. I do know that I'm going to wait for my lawyer before answering anything else, though."

"Well, you called an awfully long time ago. Maybe he's not coming."

"She. And she'll be here."

He stared Shelby down for awhile. Eventually, Shelby was called out of the room and replaced by a pair of agents. When the door opened, he could hear a distinctly female voice arguing with someone in the hallway.

The two new agents, LeClaire and Kawamoto, shut the door and the room was quiet again.

"Hello, Mr. Byers," LeClaire said, taking a seat. "Let's try this again, shall we?"

Kawamoto put on a pair of reading glasses, opened up a file and sat down beside her. "This isn't the first time you've been brought in for questioning, is it? There was that business with the computer company out in Vienna last year. Before that some minor breaking and entering, but no formal charges filed. Suspicion of a whole hell of a lot of other things, but nothing that seemed to stick... All the way back to Baltimore in '89. Did they ever find out who killed those people in that warehouse?"

"They never found any bodies in that warehouse," Byers snapped before he could stop himself, "so I'm thinking probably not."

"You know what they say about knowing where all the bodies are buried," LeClaire said with a smile. She couldn't have been much more than a year out of the Academy. He wondered how she'd scored an assignment like this with so many veteran agents.

"What is this about?" he asked. "You can't really be interested in Baltimore. That was thirteen years ago and out of your jurisdiction."

"It's part of the whole picture, though, isn't it? You've been involved in some pretty suspicious stuff, Mr. Byers, and it all seems to start with that warehouse in Baltimore."

"You have no idea."

"Why don't you tell us, then," Kawamoto said. "You really believe all that stuff you write? Enough to break the law to make other people believe?"

The door opened then and Meg walked in, looking frustrated, flanked by Agents Lloyd and Shelby. LeClaire gave them a questioning look and Lloyd shrugged, as if to say he'd _tried_ to stall her.

"Don't answer that," Meg snapped. "Don't say anything."

"Actually, if you have your client's best interest at heart, you'll encourage him to talk to us," Shelby said.

"Don't listen to them, either, John." She looked pointedly around the room. "If I might speak to my client alone, Agents?"

"Ms. Halliday-"

"Unless the justice system has undergone a radical transformation since last September, Agent Kawamoto, I'm still within my rights to speak to my client in confidence. That generally works better without you present."

They left, but Byers could tell they weren't happy about it. Meg sat down at the table.

"Are you all right?"

"Yeah, I'm fine. They kept me locked up all day and didn't start asking questions until just before you got here, though."

"I've actually been here since three o'clock," she said, "sitting in the waiting area outside. Apparently, the Patriot Act has all sorts of magic powers I wasn't previously aware of."

"The Patriot Act?" he echoed. "What on earth does that have to do with me?"

"I was hoping you could tell me that." She leaned close to him and lowered her voice as though she was afraid someone might be listening. She was probably right. "I'm entirely out of my depth here," she said softly. "I generally wind up defending eighteen-year-old high school drop-outs picked up on shoplifting or minor possession charges... I think you should find a different lawyer, John."

"Yeah, well. You're the only one I can afford."

"Who says you can afford me?" she said with a glimmer of humor. He couldn't help smiling back. "If this had happened a year ago you wouldn't have called me. What would you have done then?"

"Prayed?"

She raised an eyebrow.

"I probably would have called Mulder." When her expression didn't register any recognition of the name, he said, "My friend at the FBI. You remember."

"Oh. Vaguely, yes. So why didn't you call him this time?"

"There are some," he paused, "complications on that front. We try not to ask for favors much anymore. I've already invoked the name of one of our remaining FBI contacts. I think that's the only reason they let me make a phone call."

Meg's frown deepened at that. "This is bad. They're talking about terrorism, John, and conspiracy. Something about a woman named al-Jafari? Does that mean anything to you?"

"No. Honestly, it doesn't."

"Are you sure? I know you guys have contact with people online. It wouldn't be unheard of. Terrorists use the Internet for recruitment, fund raising. Is there anything you can think of, anything at all? The agents mentioned some of your articles. They also said this al-Jafari woman goes by several different aliases: Runtz, Harlow..."

"Oh, my god... Yves," he said.

"So you do know her."

"Yes, but not by that name."

It made a certain amount of sense, he reflected, the idea of Yves as a terrorist. After Meg had left, they'd returned him to the holding cell. He didn't doubt that they would try questioning him again, probably sooner rather than later. He didn't believe for one second that Yves herself was a terrorist, but given her background he could understand why the newly-paranoid U.S. Government thought she was. His immediate problem, though, was the fact that the government probably also thought he knew more about her than he actually did.

He finally drifted off to sleep around midnight, about ten minutes before Agent LeClaire came to fetch him for a late-night round of questioning. The timing, he realized, was probably not a coincidence.

"Shouldn't my lawyer be here for this?" he said, taking the seat she offered him.

Agent Lloyd was already there with two cups of Starbucks coffee. He pushed one across the table to Byers.

"Here. We went out and got some decent coffee. The stuff they brew here sucks."

It was a little late for good cop, bad cop, but Byers accepted the coffee anyway.

"So now that you've had a chance to chat with your lawyer, maybe take a nice long nap, are you ready to talk to us about Hayat al-Jafari?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"See, you're going to have some trouble convincing me of that." Lloyd slid a glossy, black and white photo across the table: a surveillance still of Byers sitting beside Yves, across from Hassan Naser.

"I don't know anyone named al-Jafari, but that woman is Yves Adele Harlow."

"That's an alias, Mr. Byers. You mean to tell us you weren't aware of that?"

"I wasn't aware of her real name, if that's what you're asking."

Lloyd sighed. "All right then. How do you know her?"

"She's fairly well-known in certain circles. I've met her several times. In the particular case you're asking about, she asked me to come along and observe while she spoke with a man being held on suspicion of terrorist activities. I did so as a journalist. I wasn't aware being a journalist had become a prosecutable offense... yet."

"It isn't. But gaining access to a secure federal detention center using false identification? That is. We're more than willing to look the other way on that count, though. After all, we're big supporters of the First Amendment..."

"I'll just bet," Byers said dryly.

"...we just want to know what you know about her."

"Honestly?" he said, rubbing his hands over his face. "You probably know more about her than I do. I know she's a fairly talented computer hacker. I know she claims that her services are up for sale to the highest bidder. And I know that she has access to information that has been useful to our publication in the past. Beyond that..."

"Beyond that what?"

"I don't think I have the kind of information about her that you're looking for."

LeClaire, standing at the far end of the room, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, said, "Let us judge that for ourselves. How about starting with how you met her?"

"I knew of her. Just rumors mostly, but I'd seen the results of some of her handiwork. The first time I actually met her, though, she stole 56 million dollars out from under me before I even noticed."

Lloyd looked at him for a long moment, like he wasn't quite sure whether Byers was kidding or not.

"Hey, you asked," he said, feeling a little defensive. Why was it that cops always asked questions they didn't actually want the answers to?

"And how exactly did she pull off this amazing theft?"

"I'd rather not wind up getting prosecuted for any computer crimes, so I think I'll wait to hear back from my lawyer before I answer that."

The door opened and an agent Byers hadn't seen before leaned in. "Take him back to holding, Lloyd. There's something you need to see."

Byers picked up the Starbucks cup. "Can I take the coffee to go?"

* * *

Byers' ex had a boyfriend, a tall, athletic guy in his mid-thirties who drove a blue Audi. Langly started running the plates before Frohike even thought to ask, so he just adjusted his binoculars and kept watching the house.

"Well, he looks fine on paper: Jack Creighton, thirty-five, unmarried, works for the Department of Transportation as a civil engineer. He builds bridges. Literally, not metaphorically."

"Thank God for that."

Creighton finally left around ten o'clock. Meg walked him out to his car, leaning down and planting a kiss on him through the open driver's side window. Once he drove off, though, she didn't go back in the house. Instead, she walked across the street and straight over to the van. They'd parked in shadow, away from any of the streetlights and to the lee of a large maple tree. Somehow she'd spotted them anyway.

She knocked on the van's sliding door, saying, "Come on, guys. Open up."

Frohike hopped in back and cracked the door open. "Hey."

"Frohike- Or, uh, Melvin…" she said, crossing her arms over her chest. "What are you doing here?"

"You got the name right this time," he said, pushing the door the rest of the way open. "Both of them."

"How did you know we were out here?" Langly asked from the front seat.

"John showed up here the other day driving this thing." She waved a hand at the van. "I didn't think it was a coincidence."

"You remember Langly," Frohike said.

"Yes, of course," she said, looking as though she couldn't quite figure out how she'd gotten mixed up with all this. "So, is anybody going to tell me why you're lurking in front of my house..." She looked around at the contents of the van, "...with night vision goggles?"

"Surveillance."

"That much is obvious. The question remains, _why_?"

The last thing Frohike could tell her was that they were trying to make sure she wasn't about to betray them all. So he said, "Our line of work is dangerous. Now that you're involved..."

Meg frowned. "Dangerous, huh?" Then, "Look, why don't you two come on inside?"

They hesitated, exchanging a look.

"I have hot chocolate."

"I'm in," Langly said, reaching up and taking the keys out of the ignition.

"Your junk food habit is going to be the death of you someday, buddy. Or do I need to bring up the poisoned muffins again?"

"I brought up the poisoned muffins myself enough times, don't you think?"

Frohike groaned at the pun, but, he had to admit, going inside would open up all sorts of avenues of investigation. Like, for instance, the medicine cabinet or Meg's laptop.

The house was nice. Not the sort of place he could ever imagine Byers living, but nice. Cozy, a little disordered, but definitely warm. Byers was the type of guy who made his bed with hospital precision, folded his socks and properly labeled every damned thing. Meg had a basket of clean laundry shoved haphazardly into the hallway, a pile of unread mail on the table and a small stack of unwashed dishes in the kitchen sink.

She made some fine hot chocolate, though.

"So," she said, handing them each a mug and sitting down at the kitchen table, "this isn't about my safety at all, is it? You're checking up on me."

There was an extended and vaguely uncomfortable silence.

"I've known John since I was eighteen," she said, looking exasperated. "He was- We were together for the better part of a decade. What, exactly, do you think they -- whoever they are -- could offer me that would make me betray him?"

"It happens," Langly shrugged.

"It does happen," Frohike said, "and it's not always black and white. Sometimes people find themselves in impossible positions."

She gave them a look that suggested that just knowing the three of them was an impossible position.

Frohike looked away, gazing around the kitchen instead, at the artifacts of what actually looked like a pretty comfortable domestic life: the windowbox herb garden, copper kettles, the hand-painted ceramic cookie jar. It was hard for him to imagine Byers in that context, married and suburban, despite the fact that they'd had pretty much a front row seat for it, right up to the messy end. Of course, Frohike suspected now that marrying Meg had been Byers' last-ditch attempt at normalcy. At the time, though, he hadn't been sure what to make of it.

A little less than two years after Susanne had first dropped into (and out of) their lives, Byers abruptly announced that he was marrying his college sweetheart -- to the surprise of pretty much everyone. Even Frohike, who liked to think he mostly had people pegged, had been shocked. He'd known Byers was seeing the girl, but it hadn't seemed serious. Not that serious, anyway. He'd only mentioned her name a handful of times. He'd never even officially introduced them. They finally met her, of course, about a year after the wedding... but that was an entirely different story.

Their lack of any solid knowledge about her was the whole point of this little visit, anyway. Did she have any secrets worthy of blackmail? A sick parent? Had she ever lied for a guilty client, or bribed a judge? Was she feeding a secret Vicodin addiction? Maybe it was time to check out the lady's medicine cabinet. He excused himself, politely asking where the bathroom was.

His gut, of course, told him that there probably wasn't anything to find. But the paranoid side of him, the one that had saved their asses on more than one occasion, couldn't rest until he was sure.

The bathroom was tiled in bright Italian blues and yellows, the ceiling painted a sky blue that gave him the slightly unsettling feeling that he was peeing au naturale. The hand soap smelled of citrus oil and sugar, like a scoop of lemon gelato, and Frohike began to suspect that Langly wasn't the only one with a sweet tooth. The mirrored door to the medicine cabinet squeaked slightly when he eased it open. He didn't find much of interest: tooth whitening paste, sunscreen, a tube of anti-wrinkle cream that looked like it probably cost as much as your average Wal-Mart employee made in a month, Claritin, cotton swabs and three months worth of birth control pills -- which probably meant that Jack the transportation engineer was getting some action. Good for him. Good for Meg, for that matter.

He snooped through the linen closet for good measure before heading into the hallway. Two closed doors faced him in one direction, the light from the kitchen in the other. He should probably have gone back, but he also knew he might not get another chance. He at least wanted to check out the bedroom, if he could.

So, would it be door number one, or door number two?

The door on the right wasn't the bedroom, after all, but an office. Meg had a nice computer: a Mac, which kind of figured. Byers was mostly a Mac guy.

A set of shelves in one corner contained a bunch of girly knicknacks and framed photographs. One of the pictures caught his eye: a group of college kids (in varying states of undress) jumping off a large rock into the ocean. It took him almost a full minute to realize that the skinny, bare-chested kid in the middle was Byers.

"That one's always been my favorite," Meg said from behind him.

Frohike jumped guiltily.

"Sorry," he said, putting the picture down. "I shouldn't snoop. Old habits."

"Go ahead," she said. "I don't mind. You must be curious, anyway. I know I was always curious about the two of you."

"That you?" he asked, pointing at the girl holding Byers' hand in the picture. She had her eyes closed so she couldn't see how far the fall was. She was laughing, though; so was Byers.

"Yes, it is. That became a yearly tradition for awhile, you know. Jumping off that stupid rock."

"Looks fun."

She just shrugged. Langly hovered in the doorway behind her.

"Way to back me up, buddy," Frohike said.

"What was I supposed to do? Send up a signal flare? I think she might have noticed."

He walked into the room and looked over Frohike's shoulder at the photo.

"Is that Byers? What a dork."

"Pots and kettles, Langly."

Meg sighed slightly. "Make yourselves comfortable. I baked cookies yesterday. I'll get some."

Langly brightened up considerably.

"Go ahead and snoop while I'm gone." She paused. "Frankly, I'm a little surprised you didn't just break in and do it while I was at work."

So was Frohike. He figured must be getting soft in his old age.

"All the important papers are in the file cabinet." She pointed at a cheap Ikea-style set of drawers. "Just to save you some time."

Langly headed for the files, while Frohike yanked open the closet door. Despite the slightly pleasant sense of clutter throughout the rest of the house, the closet was neatly ordered. Clearly-labeled plastic boxes were stacked one on top of the other. Now that was more what he would've expected from a woman who'd managed to put up with co-habituating with Byers for an extended period of time.

Something colorful on the top shelf caught his eye. It was one of those girly hat-box things, printed with abstract flowers. Inside he found old photos, videotapes, a stack of letters tied together with a hair ribbon. There was also a small cream-colored envelope fastened with a rubber band. Wedding pictures. She'd kept them. After all the crap Byers had pulled (with a lot of help, he had to admit, from them), he was surprised the pictures hadn't wound up in a ritual cleansing bonfire in the backyard.

The wedding appeared to have been small and done on the cheap, but otherwise it looked like your typical white, middle class affair: the photos included several different angles of a stiff, frosted layer cake that had probably cost too much and tasted like cardboard held together by paste; a black and white shot of Meg, in a plain ivory wedding dress, standing next to Byers, who was wearing a formal suit, looking impossibly young and too skinny, with truly terrible early '90s hair; a candid of Byers taking a slug from a hip flask offered to him by an equally dorky guy in a matching grey suit; another candid of a woman, who must have been Byers' mom, dabbing at her eye with a handkerchief. 

Byers' dad, though, was conspicuous by his absence. Frohike knew they'd been on the outs by that point, but Byers had never mentioned that dear old dad had ditched out on the wedding.

"I don't think you're going to find anything incriminating in there, unless you count the way I wore my hair in 1983," Meg said, coming back into the room with a plate of peanut butter

cookies and indicating the open box on the floor. "John would probably be embarrassed if he knew I still had all that stuff..."

"I don't know if embarrassed is exactly the word I would use." _Chagrined, maybe_, he thought. _A little shamed._

Langly grabbed two cookies and shot Meg a smile. "Awesome."

"I think I have John's senior class picture in there somewhere, if you're ever looking to blackmail him," she said. "I have three words for you: Flock. Of. Seagulls."

She took a seat on the floor beside Frohike and looked over his shoulder at the wedding photos.

"Oh. Yeah. I still have those, too."

"Sorry," he said, closing the folder and replacing the rubber band. "I was just curious, I guess, since our invitations got lost in the mail and all."

"It was fairly small. John didn't want a lot of people there." She almost sounded bitter, just a little bit. "Mostly just family."

"Except your father-in-law. He couldn't even make peace long enough to come to the wedding?"

"Actually, I'm not sure John invited him."

"Oh."

"He did, at least, sign the card that came with the wedding gift, so he's not as big a bastard as you're probably thinking." She offered Frohike the plate of cookies. "Bert and I always got along, you know. I actually think he might have done better with a daughter. He was never… entirely comfortable with John. There was so much pressure with a son. I think he sort of saw John as a legacy rather than a whole person."

"So when Byers met us and decided to drop out of polite society…"

"It didn't go over particularly well," she said.

"But _you_ didn't mind."

Langly, still poking through the box, had picked up an unlabeled video cassette and was staring at it.

"Who says I didn't?" Meg walked over and took the tape from Langly.

"You married him anyway."

"That doesn't mean I had any idea what I was getting into. I was twenty-five and so in love I couldn't see straight. You have to know what that's like."

Langly made a face that indicated he didn't, but Frohike said, "Oh, yeah, and I was never stupider. But I don't regret it."

"Regret's a funny thing," was all she said in response. Then, "I was hoping to get you two to talk about him, but I guess I should've known better."

"Bribing us with cookies? I knew you had an ulterior motive." He paused. "What do you want to know?"

"Everything," she said, with a slightly sad smile. "But I'll settle for how he's doing -- really."

Frohike shifted uncomfortably and exchanged a look with Langly.

"That good, huh?" she said.

"He's got... stuff going on, you know," Langly offered unhelpfully.

"Including a potential indictment under the Patriot Act." She picked up a cookie of her own and took a bite.

"You think they'll really do it?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. My instincts say they won't. They don't really want John, they want this Yves woman you told me about. But if they can't get the information they want, they might settle for the little fish."

"We aren't any kind of fish," Langly said. "We haven't even seen Yves in over a year."

Meg had a much better poker face than her former husband, but Frohike considered himself a pretty good judge of when people were lying -- even by omission. There was a flicker of something across her expression, a twitch -- maybe a half a second's reaction, maybe not even that -- but it was there, and the implication was clear enough. It wasn't just blind luck that the Feds picked up Byers but not them. He knew something about Yves. She'd contacted him, or possibly the other way around.

_Damn it_, he thought. What had Byers gotten himself into?

* * *

Yves kept a virtual eye, for a variety of reasons, on the FBI's counterterrorism task force. A few months back, she'd set up a script that tracked federal warrants being issued under the Patriot Act. So far her own name had yet to show up.

But unless there was more than one John F. Byers in the greater Washington D.C. area, they were in very big trouble indeed.

This scenario (among, if she was honest with herself, more personal considerations) was exactly the reason she'd chosen to drop out of sight in the first place. She had always worked resolutely alone. Allies and associates meant nothing but trouble; they could betray you for more money or trade their testimony for a sweet deal. But somehow, inexplicably, from the moment Melvin Frohike walked in and asked her to help him stop a jetliner crashing into the World Trade Center, she'd been a goner. It was still hard to think about that night. Whenever she tried, she wound up seeing a sunny Tuesday morning instead, somehow superimposing the two events in her memory. Maybe she felt like she ought to have been able to stop them both.

At any rate, that had been the moment she'd lost her status as 'mysterious loner.' She hadn't even noticed it at first -- or maybe she had, but the prospect of some actual human attachments had simply been too appealing after so long. As exasperating as they could be (and as often as she'd been driven to consider justifiable homicide), they were good men and she'd secretly come to like them.

Miami, though, had ruined everything.

Of course, even Miami wouldn't have been irreparable if not for 9/11. After the attacks, Yves found herself actually afraid, for the first time in very long while. She was still afraid, although the reasons for her fears had evolved over the past months. She could hardly leave the U.S. -- that was completely out of the question -- but she was also afraid to stay. So, not knowing what else to do, she hid.

When Byers contacted her, she'd almost been relieved.

Now, of course, she'd managed to get him arrested, which meant his welfare was her responsibility. Langly and Frohike would never actually tell her what was happening. So, instead, she was planning to eavesdrop on them.

If they were really as paranoid as they fancied themselves, she would never have been able to pull it off once, let alone several times. They'd gotten comfortable in their little bat-cave, reliant on their patrons at the FBI. They took risks they shouldn't, acted without regard for their personal safety, and, most importantly, trusted people they had no business trusting.

Like, just for example, her.

She parked her rented Chevrolet near the mouth of an alley where she could see anyone who entered or left their offices but, hopefully, they couldn't see her.

And then she waited.

No lights were visible from inside the warehouse, but she knew they were there. The VW was parked out front, alongside another vehicle that she suspected (and hoped) was Jimmy's. Her suspicions were confirmed when, after an hour or so, Jimmy emerged from the office, twirling his keys, and headed for the second car.

It must have been new, a shiny toy that he clearly hadn't had for very long, judging by the way he slowed down to look it over appreciatively before getting behind the wheel. She turned her own key in the ignition and got ready to follow him.

Jimmy really was, despite the fact that it bothered her somehow to admit it, the weak link in their security.

She followed him to the Whole Foods in Silver Spring. There was a very good chance he might spot her, but it was a calculated risk and one she had to take if she wanted to find out what was going on with Byers.

Yves waited until Jimmy had safely passed through the automatic double doors into the market, then took out a tiny, electronic lock-pick -- the sort favored by car thieves. It took a few tries to find the right frequency, but after a minute she had the doors to his car unlocked.

She slid behind the wheel, opened the compartment above the rearview, clearly designed to hold sunglasses, and pressed a tiny listening device into the back corner. A back-up, just in case Plan A didn't work.

She put the car to rights again, slid on a pair of dark glasses even though it was past dusk, and walked into the store.

She spotted Jimmy near the deli case. He seemed to be putting a lot of care into which foods he selected for some reason she couldn't fathom, given the well-established take-out and burger joint tastes of the men he was shopping for.

It was near closing so only one register was still open. She waited until the only other customers in the store had paid and the cashier wandered off to start cleaning up, then reached over the register and grabbed a 100 recycled paper bag. She slid a wafer-thin device underneath the flap below the handle and pressed the adhesive home. Once that was done and the bag was replaced, she ought to have left immediately. Lingering only increased the chance he would spot her.

She hung around anyway, hiding behind the bottled water machine and waiting for him to finish his shopping.

The college girl at the Jamba Juice counter took an inordinately long time getting his order right and flirted conspicuously with him as he dithered over whether to add a shot of wheatgrass to his orange-carrot juice. When the drinks were finally ready, the girl wrote her phone number on a napkin and handed it over along with the order.

She was far too young for him. Even Jimmy had to realize that.

If he did, though, he didn't give any sign of it, just tucked her phone number into a pocket of his jeans and smiled at her on his way to go pay.

Yves took that as her cue to exit.

Back in the car, she turned on the engine and fired up the laptop, checking the listening devices. Jimmy did indeed have both of them, and both worked. He was driving, singing along to Radiohead on the car stereo and drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. When he got back to the office, he parked and took the bugged grocery bag inside with him.

They would do a sweep eventually and find the device, but hopefully not until after she had the information she needed. Yves parked a block or so away and settled in to listen.

Jimmy set the bag down and began handing out food. Voices crackled to life around him.

"What the hell is this, Jimmy?" Langly snapped.

"It's an energy-boost smoothie. It has gingko biloba in it... You know, it helps you think clearer..."

"What a load of-"

"Good job, Jimmy," Frohike cut in. "It's real tasty. I haven't had carrot juice... well, ever."

"I got soup, too, and sprouted wheat bread."

Langly made a noise that sounded, even through the laptop's tinny speakers, distinctly like gagging.

"It's, you know, brain food," Jimmy offered, but no one appeared to be listening. "You guys said we needed to think hard and figure out how to help Byers..."

"Great idea, Jimmy," Frohike said, distractedly, the sound of tapping keys in the background.

"You really think the ex will be able to get him out of there?" Langly said, clearly ignoring Jimmy and attempting to change the subject.

"Byers seems to think she's a good lawyer." There was a pause. "Of course, she's probably the only lawyer he knows."

"She's also the only lawyer who'll represent him for free."

"If it's about money..." That was Jimmy, of course.

"Nah, kid. Don't jump the gun and bring in Johnny Cochrane yet. We'll see how Meg does first."

"But she's a good person? You trust her?"

"We don't really know her. When they were married, Byers tried to keep her away from all our craziness as much as possible... Don't look worried. We had a chat with her last night. She seems solid."

Byers had been married? That was news to Yves. But, then, she'd never done in-depth background checks on any of them. A sloppy decision maybe, but at first they'd seemed so comical, and then later... well, she'd just figured that they were mostly harmless. After all, they'd had plenty of chances to betray her and hadn't done it.

In light of the current circumstances, though, maybe it was time to get some more information.

As it turned out, it wasn't at all hard to find.

Megan Halliday, currently a member of the D.C. Bar Association, had married a John F. Byers in June of 1991. She filed for divorce, citing 'irreconcilable differences' in December of 1994.

All that information was freely available via Google. It didn't take much more digging to pull her credit report, 2001 tax return and a VIN number on her car from the Maryland DMV. She worked for Legal Aid, gave money regularly to Doctors Without Borders and drove a 2001 Toyota Prius -- Maryland license plate HPG-W97.

A bleeding heart do-gooder. How unsurprising.

She also had a 20-year fixed mortgage on a two-bedroom house in the more fashionable historic end of Takoma Park and, apparently, lived alone.

Yves made it across town in under ten minutes, only to discover that the Byers' ex-wife wasn't actually home yet.

The only thing for it, of course, was to pick the lock and lurk inside until she did come home.

Around ten, a blue Audi pulled into the driveway, and a woman got out. She leaned down and said something to the driver, but Yves couldn't hear anything from her spot near the living room window.

Meg Halliday was attractive but not remarkable, a classic nice girl type. Yves also noted that she had a good three inches and at least twenty pounds on Meg, if it came down to a tussle. She doubted it would, but anything could happen.

The front door opened, but Yves didn't move, just let the curtain fall back into place, blocking the light from the street lamp and plunging the room back into shadow.

Walking into the living room, Meg kicked off her shoes and turned on the answering machine.

"Meg, it's Jenna. Guess who came to visit me today... Two very nice men from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. You weren't kidding about your ex, were you? He looks so deceptively average... Luckily, I don't appear to have actually broken any laws, and I never met any of the other people involved so they promptly lost interest in me. Anyway, I thought you'd want to know. Give me a call this week. I can only imagine that you need a drink."

"I could use a drink," Yves said smoothly, standing up and switching on a table lamp.

"What the hell?" Meg spun around. "Who are you?"

"Just relax. I'm not going to hurt you. I need to talk to you about Byers."

"His friends are outside, so if you're here to-"

"No, they aren't. If they were here before, they aren't now and haven't been for awhile. But I said I wasn't going to hurt you." Yves moved over and sat down on the sofa. "I just want to ask you some questions."

"So you broke into my house?"

"I didn't imagine you'd let me in if I just asked nicely."

"That makes the second time this week," she said, looking defeated, and dropped heavily into an armchair. "I have got to get an alarm system."

"That's probably not a bad idea," Yves said, amused.

"You're her, aren't you? Yves Harlow, or whatever your name happens to be at the moment."

"Yes, I am."

"The FBI thinks you're a terrorist," she said bluntly. "They think John's been helping you."

So that was it. It was bad, but not as bad as it could have been. She wondered who'd put them onto her. The timing was suspicious enough that it probably wasn't a coincidence.

"Look, do you want to tell me what's going on here?" Meg said. "I'm being watched, people are breaking and entering all over the place..."

"I just want to make sure Byers is all right," Yves said, choosing her words carefully.

"And to find out exactly what the FBI knows about you."

"There's that too, yes."

"I don't know much," Meg said, "and even if I did know something, I'm not sure how much I ought to tell you."

"Why don't you just start with whatever Byers has told you about me."

"Not much." She shrugged. "His friend Melvin says you're a computer hacker."

"He hasn't told you anything? But you're his lawyer."

"You'd be surprised the things clients don't tell their lawyers," she paused, then said a little wryly, "or the things husbands don't tell their wives. Look, he would never talk to me about this part of his life before. Frankly, I'm surprised he asked for my help this time."

Yves sighed. That sort of wrong-headed chivalry seemed perfectly in-character for Byers.

"If it helps at all, I don't think the FBI knows exactly why they want you. Your name is probably on some list and so they're checking you out for any ties to terrorists."

"I could always go to the FBI myself..."

Meg gave her a long, scrutinizing look. "No. I don't think John would want you to do that."

Yves let out a breath she didn't realize she'd been holding, embarrassingly relieved that it wasn't going to come that, at least not yet.

"But I do want to help-" Yves began.

"If I'm any good at my job, you won't have to." Meg rubbed at her eyes, looking suddenly very tired. "If I'm not..." She let the words hang on the air for a moment before she shrugged. "Besides, there's no guarantee that turning yourself in will do anything to help John. It might actually make things worse for him."

Yves nodded thoughtfully. She'd considered that, of course, but felt -- irrationally, perhaps -- that she had to do _something_.

"Just tell me one thing..." Meg said, breaking the silence. "What is John working with you on? He seemed reluctant to tell me, but it might make a difference."

Yves was pretty reluctant herself, especially considering that this was his ex-wife. But Meg had agreed to help him out, so presumably their relationship was amicable enough.

"He's looking for someone, a woman, who disappeared in New York on 11 September." She hesitated. "It's a personal thing. Or, at least, mostly personal. It doesn't really have anything to do with me or his work, not directly. I just said I'd help."

"I see. Okay, that helps." Meg's expression was entirely neutral. "Did either of you break any laws on this personal errand of his?"

"Quite a few I'd imagine."

"In that case, the less I know the better." She reached over a grabbed a notepad out of her bag, jotting down a few things.

Yves watched her curiously for a few moments.

Meg looked up from her notes and caught Yves staring. "What?"

She shook her head. "I just- I have trouble imagining him married."

"Funny," Meg said sharply, shutting the notebook with a snap. "So did he."

* * *

As dreams went, Jimmy's were fairly mundane.

Often, they were memories, mostly of football and girls, of the winning point after the touchdown and a redhead named Rebecca. Sometimes he dreamed his childhood, too. Like Thanksgiving back when there'd still been enough family to fill all the seats at the dining room table, or the days when he'd bring his dad slices of homemade bread, wrapped in wax paper and thick with butter and preserves, in the office behind the church.

When he had nightmares, those were mostly memories, too: getting lost in the Stewarts' field of sweet corn when he was six, waiting down in the cellar while tornadoes tore through the town outside, the day his dad died, a lone helmet lying on the Astroturf and exactly what the angle of a  
broken neck looked like.

(Though, lately, he'd been having this nightmare about radioactive sharks that he couldn't make heads nor tails of.)

And sometimes, maybe more often than he really liked to admit, he dreamed about Yves. They weren't nice dreams, not usually. He dreamed a lot about the last time he'd seen her. He also dreamed about where she might be these days and what might be happening to her.

Something usually triggered those dreams, something that jogged a memory or made him wonder whether she was all right. So it made sense that he would dream about her that night. Earlier, he could have sworn he smelled her perfume. How he knew it was hers was up for debate. His knowledge of her was spotty, intentionally incomplete, a strange mix of intimate and impersonal.

He knew that her skin tasted like sandalwood and cocoa butter, and what the rhythm of her breath sounded like when she cried, but he didn't know how old she was or her real first name.

She'd been crying in his dream, too, asking him please not to do something but refusing to tell him what.

"Yves, please. I don't understand."

"No, you don't," she said, and that's when he'd woken up.

He woke up on one of the ratty couches in the _Lone Gunman_ office, and couldn't quite remember where he was for a minute. The phone was ringing, loudly, which must have been what woke him. He hauled himself up off the couch and went to answer it.

Halfway there, Langly intercepted him.

"Don't," he said, emerging from a back bedroom, clad only in a t-shirt and boxer shorts printed with the logo of one of the many reincarnations of the _Star Trek_ series. "I'll get it. It might be important.

"Lone Gunman... Oh, hey. Yeah, this is Langly. Seriously? That's good news. I'll tell Frohike. You need us to go pick him up? Oh, okay. So later today probably? Hey, good work."

Frohike wandered out into the office as Langly hung up.

"Good news, man."

"If you tell me that you just saved money on car insurance, I'm gonna pop you one," Frohike said crankily, rubbing his eyes with both fists and heading for the coffeemaker.

"The ex is getting Byers sprung from the big house."

"In English this time?"

Langly wadded up a piece of notepaper and threw it at him. "Meg called. She did some lawyer-fu and got a judge to agree to make the feds release Byers."

"Excellent."

"That's great news!" Jimmy said, beating Frohike to the coffee and pouring three cups: one black, one with cream and two sugars, and one with skim milk.

"Thanks, Jimmy."

"She said she's coming by here first..."

"And?"

"Well," Langly went slightly pink in the cheeks, "I just thought maybe we should clean up a little."

He gestured at the take-out boxes and empty cans of Mountain Dew littering the tables. Bags of dirty laundry were stacked by the door for their weekly laundry run. A _Playboy_ lay face down next to one of the keyboards.

"I'll do it," Jimmy offered.

Langly and Frohike both started to protest at once.

"And I promise not to throw anything away without running it past you guys first, okay?"

"All right, Jimmy," Frohike said, giving in. "I'll make us all some breakfast."

Byers' ex-wife showed up a few hours later, while Jimmy was hauling laundry bags out to the van. He caught her hesitating on the steps when he opened the door, the expression on her face unreadable and one foot stepping backward as though she might just leave without coming inside.

"Uh, hi," he said, shifting his grip on the laundry.

She was the tiny sort of girl he probably would have picked up and carried around under one arm in high school, just to prove he could.

She blinked up at him. "Hi. I think maybe I, uh, have the wrong place..."

Her gaze shifted to the number on the warehouse door.

"If you're looking for _The Lone Gunman_, you're in the right spot. You're Meg, right?"

"I guess I am in the right place then," she said, giving Jimmy a second look.

"Here, let me toss this in the car and I'll let you in."

Jimmy sprinted back up the steps, punched in the security code and held the door for her.

"It's so great that you-" he began, but a voice from inside cut him off.

"Jimmy, what are you- Oh, it's you," Langly said, squinting at Meg through his glasses. "I didn't recognize you at first."

"Yeah. Well, it's been awhile," Meg said dryly, glancing around the office. "Wow, I don't think I've ever gotten to come inside the clubhouse before."

"Security, you know. We don't exactly give hourly tours."

She toyed with the corner of a mock-up of the upcoming issue. The headline read, 'Secret CIA Planes Kidnap Terror Suspects.'

"Uh-huh." She was still looking around, as though trying to memorize what the inside of the place looked like.

"Hey, good job, kid," Frohike said. "We owe you big time."

"Thanks. But getting John released doesn't mean you guys are out of trouble yet, you know."

"Trouble's practically our middle name," Frohike said with a grin.

"I don't doubt it."

"So, was there something else you needed from us?"

Meg hesitated, then said, "Actually, no. To be honest, I just really wanted to see this place -- and the chances of that happening on a day when John's not behind bars are pretty slim."

But Jimmy had the distinct sense she wasn't telling the entire truth.

"So, what should our next move be?"

"For the moment, I go get John and you guys stay here and try your best not to get into any _more_ trouble."

"Oh, yeah," Frohike said. "That's worked so well for us in the past."

"Well, I did say 'try'."

"We'll give it our best shot. You want coffee?"

"Uh, sure. Why not?" she said, taking a seat.

Frohike grabbed Langly by the sleeve and hauled him over to the coffeemaker, where the two spoke in hushed voices while Frohike rinsed off a stack of dirty mugs.

"I'm Jimmy, by the way," Jimmy said, sitting down and extending a hand to Meg. "I don't whether Byers has mentioned-"

"Sorry. He hasn't." She smiled at him, shaking his hand. "But then, he probably hasn't told you anything about me, either. That's kind of his thing. It doesn't mean he doesn't care."

"He doesn't really talk about that stuff. Maybe with Frohike sometimes, if there's beer…"

"What stuff? Girls?" She glanced around the office again. "I guess this really is the clubhouse, isn't it? 'No girls allowed.'"

He wasn't entirely sure whether she was joking or not, but he said, "Aw, we let girls in sometimes."

She laughed softly, and he relaxed. He'd guessed right.

"Oh, I bet all the girls come here to see you," she said, still laughing, and he felt himself blush a little bit. "How did you get mixed up in all of this, anyway?"

"The guys helped me out awhile back. I really appreciated what they were trying to do, how they were trying to help people. So I invested."

"Invested?" she said, looking surprised. "Like real money?"

"Yeah. That's usually how it works, right?" he said, running a hand through his hair. He got the distinct sense she disapproved.

"How much money, exactly?"

"Well, I… uh, don't really know off the top of my head." Which was, of course, a total lie, but he somehow couldn't bring himself to say the amount out loud -- especially not to her.

After a minute, though, her face softened. "You have a lawyer, don't you, Jimmy? And a financial planner?"

"Yup."

"And what did they say about this investment of yours?"

"That charities were a better tax write-off, and that magazines have a high rate of financial failure." He smiled back at her. "But I knew all of that already."

"Sorry. I didn't mean to insult you-"

"You didn't. Under different circumstances, Byers would probably have asked the same thing. He doesn't like to see people being exploited either." He paused. "Which I'm not, by the way. The guys have never accepted anything I didn't offer first."

She frowned, and he worried that he'd said something wrong.

"Are you all right?"

"Just remembering a lot of old baggage." She sighed. "And it seems like there are still just as many secrets. I'm not sure who I'm allowed to tell what."

"Byers told you not to tell us something?"

She hesitated. "Not exactly. There's just a lot of double-talk, which I guess shouldn't surprise me at all. And then there's this business with that woman-"

"Who? Susanne?" Jimmy didn't know much about that part of Byers' life. Just a name and some vague hints.

Meg frowned. "Is that what she's calling herself this week? She certainly fancies herself some sort of super-spy, doesn't she?"

Jimmy blinked. That didn't fit at all with what he'd heard about Susanne, but before he could ask, Meg was talking again.

"You know, I came here partly because I've always been curious. That wasn't a lie. But," she hesitated, "I also thought maybe I ought to ask… or tell… or, hell, I don't know."

She flopped back against the red velour sofa.

"You seem like a normal guy, Jimmy. How do you deal with all this?"

"All what?"

"Here you go, kid," Frohike interrupted, trotting over with a cup of hot coffee. "I couldn't remember how you take it so-"

"That's fine. Thanks." Meg took a sip, made a face, and surreptitiously set the cup on the arm of the sofa.

"I thought I'd buy dinner tonight," Jimmy said, looking first at Frohike, then back at Meg. "You know, to celebrate -- and to thank you for your help."

"You don't have to do that."

"I know. I want to."

"That's a good idea, Jimmy," Frohike said. "We'll chip in for the chow, though. You don't have to buy. How does Star Thai sound?"

"I was thinking maybe Chinese," Jimmy said. "Byers likes Chinese, not Thai."

"Because he doesn't like peanut sauce." Meg shook her head. "I'd forgotten that. You're a good friend, Jimmy. I hope he appreciates you."

"He does."

Meg didn't exactly seem convinced of that, though.

"Yeah, yeah," Langly said. "We'll all have a big group hug once Byers gets home."

"I think that's my cue to leave," Meg said. "Don't worry. I'll bring him home in one piece, boys."

* * *

He never would have believed it, but after awhile even a federal interrogation got boring.

"Come on, Mr. Byers," Agent LeClaire was saying, "we can help you, if you'll just work with us."

She had dark circles under her eyes, her hair frizzing at the ends, and looked like she hadn't gotten much more sleep than Byers had.

"And I've told you... for going on, what?" He glanced at his watch. "Eleven hours now? That I don't have the information you want. You can keep asking, but I really don't know where Yves is or much of anything about her background."

He heard voices out in the corridor then, and the door swung open.

"Meg," he said, relieved. "Am I glad to see you."

"I think you'll be gladder to see this," she said, holding up a folded piece of blue paper and grinning at him. He had a sudden memory of her doing the same once with a backstage pass at a U2 concert.

"What's that?" LeClaire asked, warily.

"Oh, this?" She handed it over. "This is just the opinion of one Judge Judith Maxwell of the Fourth Circuit Court that you're holding my client illegally. Come on, John. We're leaving."

LeClaire looked to the doorway, but the agent standing behind Meg just shook his head.

They processed his paperwork quickly and brought out his personal effects. He sorted through the box, pulling out his cellphone, his wallet, his tie, his keys... Oh, damn it. They'd pulled the hard drive out of his laptop. _Damn_ it. He knew better than to keep anything important on it, but still.

"Typical," Meg said, looking at the computer. "We can file a claim to get you reimbursed for the damage, but you're probably not getting any of your data back."

"It doesn't matter," he said. "I mean, I could definitely use the money, but there wasn't anything on the drive that isn't replaceable."

The sun was setting when they emerged from the building. Meg's tiny, aquamarine hybrid didn't have much in the way of leg room, even when he pushed the passenger's seat all the way back. Meg, of course, was five-foot-nothing in heels so it probably wasn't usually an issue.

"Sorry," she said, watching him struggle. "It's not just you. Jack completely refuses to ride in this car."

"How _is_ Jack?" he said, fastening his seatbelt as she pulled out of the lot.

"None of your business. I thought we'd covered that?"

"You brought him up," he said, unbuttoning his shirt collar and pulling his tie from his coat pocket.

"In passing." She paused as she waited for the traffic signal to change. "You'll notice I haven't asked about your personal life at all."

She said it casually, but there was something in her tone that suggested she knew more than she was letting on.

That represented decidedly dangerous territory, so he decided to change the subject. "Thank you for coming to get me, by the way."

"There's no need for that."

"Well, thanks anyway."

"Like I said, no need. Just for the record, though," Meg said, "this makes twice now that I've managed to get you out of jail."

"Didn't you promise to let me rot there, after the first time?" he said, attempting to fasten his tie by the light of the vanity mirror.

"Things were different then. For one thing, back then you told me you were off visiting Carol when you were actually in an abandoned warehouse in Philadelphia hacking into a government mainframe."

"To be fair, they didn't arrest us for hacking, just breaking and entering -- and they wound up dropping those charges anyway."

"Which might have made a difference if that had actually been what I was angry about."

"What was I supposed to do?" he asked, feeling defensive despite the fact that she'd made the comment lightly. It had been a long time since he'd found himself in this particular situation. Somehow, despite all the time and distance in between, Meg managed to make him feel like as big a jerk as ever. "I couldn't just announce to you that we were about to commit a crime."

"Why not?"

"Because-" Because it would have put her in danger, because she could have been arrested right along with him, because he just plain hadn't wanted her to see that side of him. "Just because," he finished."

"Well, it's nice to see that some things haven't changed," she said, never taking her eyes off the road.

"Apparently not," he snapped. "You still resent my work, for instance."

"Resent it? Is that what you really think?" she said, starting to lose her cool a little.

"Well, what else would you call it?"

"Stop," she said. "This isn't going to get us anywhere. We've been doing so well. For the first time in years, I feel like we might be able to really be friends again. I don't want to jeopardize that by bring up old baggage-"

Of course. So she got to be the bigger person, the mature one. This was so typical. It was as though the past eight years hadn't even happened.

"Clearly, it isn't so old that we can't still fight about it."

"We're not fighting. I don't want to fight." She shot a look over at him, as though wondering how the conversation had gone so suddenly and spectacularly wrong.

They drove in total silence for a few minutes. Meg reached over to turn up the radio. He put a hand out and stopped her.

"You never believed, Meg. You never believed in the work, which meant you never believed in me."

"That does it," she said, and abruptly pulled over to the side of the road. "We should have hashed this out a long time ago, but you're the one who never seemed to want to. You've been keeping me at a safe distance for years. So, fine. Now you want to talk about it? Have at it."

And very suddenly he found that he didn't have anything to say.

"Go on. I'm waiting. You were saying that I never believed in you."

"Meg-"

"Because it isn't true. I believed in you. I believed that you were a good man, that you were brave and that you loved me." She put the car in neutral and turned to look at him. "It was never that I didn't believe in you. It wasn't even that I didn't believe in what you were trying to do, John. I know there's government corruption and injustice, that there are powerful people who game the system or just ignore it altogether because they think the law doesn't apply to them. I see it everyday. I agree with you there. What I didn't agree with- what I _don't_ agree with is your methods."

He opened his mouth to protest, but she held up a hand.

"That's not even really what I mean." She took a breath, as though choosing her words carefully. "Civil disobedience, outright dissent, those things are valuable. But they lose their effectiveness if that's all you ever do. I don't disagree with your mission; I disagree with how you pick your battles."

He was silent for a long moment, then said, "Why didn't you tell me all this eight years ago?"

"I didn't know I felt it, at least not clearly enough to put it into words. I was too hurt. All I knew for sure was that the only person I'd ever really loved valued something else far more than he'd ever value me. I couldn't look past that to see the logical reasons why you did what you did, or why I thought it was wrong." She shrugged. "Also? I thought there was someone else."

"There kind of was," he admitted. "Not the way you probably thought, just an idea of someone else. A memory, really. But, either way, it wasn't fair to you."

"This woman you're looking for?"

He blinked in surprise. "How exactly do you know about that?"

"I had a chat with your friend Hayat, or Yves, or whatever her name is." At his surprised look, she said, "She contacted me. I got the distinct impression she was worried you were going to get shipped down to Guantanamo Bay because of her. She's... an interesting case."

"And she told you about Susanne?"

"Not details. Just that there was someone you were trying to find, a woman, that it had something to do with 9/11. I don't get the impression that you're one of those nut-jobs who thinks George Bush planned and executed the attacks via the CIA, so I filled in the blanks myself. I could still be wrong, though."

"About Susanne? Or that I'm a nut-job?"

"The jury's still out on both counts." But she smiled a little when she said it. He tried to smile back.

The lights from passing cars went arcing across the interior of the car, reflecting in the mirrors. Something soft and acoustic played on the radio. Meg turned and looked out the window, while he watched her and considered.

"I met her in 1989," he said, after a minute of indecision. "The circumstances of our meeting, the things that happened to her... It changed my entire perspective."

"You were lovers?"

"Not then."

Meg turned back to look at him, chewing slightly on her lower lip, something she'd done when they were younger -- before an exam, after a fight with her mom. Back then, it was how he'd been able to tell when she was really upset.

"When?"

"Not until years later: '99. I saw her again in Las Vegas."

Meg stopped chewing on her lip.

"I never cheated..." he began.

"It's all right. I didn't really think you had." She'd gotten better at lying, over the years. He could still tell, though.

"Meg-"

"I think we've talked enough for one night, don't you? Besides, all this honesty is making me hungry, and you must be starved." She smiled at him again, but there were lines of exhaustion around her eyes that hadn't been there before. "What do you say? Let me buy you a cinnamon roll and some coffee?"

"Sure. But this time, I'll buy."

* * *

"Fascists," Langly said, staring at the gutted laptop.

Byers walked over to the worktable, rubbing a towel over his damp hair. The first thing he'd done upon returning home was to thrust his computer into Langly's hands; the second had been to take a shower.

"Is it as bad as it looks?"

"Just about." Langly squinted at the gaping hole where the hard drive had previously been. "We'll have to find a new one somehow, and that won't exactly be cheap."

"Meg said she thinks she can get some compensation from the FBI…"

"Oh, sure," Frohike said. "That'll happen… about two weeks from never."

"Where is Meg?" Jimmy said, from his seat on the couch. "I told her I'd buy dinner."

Byers turned to face him. "You asked my ex-wife out for dinner?"

"Relax," Frohike said. "We were _all_ gonna go to dinner. Which, by the way, I think is still an excellent plan. I'm starving."

"Did you guys spend a lot of time with her while I was in custody?" Byers asked.

"Your wife can bake, man," was all Langly said, followed by a noncommittal shrug.

"Should I even…?"

"Probably not, man."

That was likely for the better. As was the fact that she wouldn't be joining them for dinner. He and Meg had gone through the drive-thru at Kripsy Kreme on the way back to Takoma Park, Meg ordering two decaf coffees and a maple cinnamon bun.

"Try not to get frosting on the seat, okay?"

He had, but she'd had the good grace not to mention it. Much.

They'd also managed to make it the rest of the way home without getting into another fight, much to his relief.

"I think-" he said when they were finally parked out front of the warehouse, "I think it's better if you don't come in."

Meg sighed and made a face that indicated she wasn't especially surprised.

"The others... Langly, Frohike... they don't know about Yves, and I'd like to keep it that way. It's a complicated situation..."

"When isn't it?" She frowned more deeply. "John-"

"It's not that I don't trust-," he began quickly.

She looked away and unlocked the doors. "I'm not sure you trust anybody, John. At least, you haven't for a long time now." Then her expression softened a little. "But thanks for the coffee."

"Thanks for getting me out of federal custody."

"Any time." She still wasn't quite looking at him. "And by 'any time,' I mean never again. Try not to get caught again, okay?"

"Or you'll let me rot there next time?"

She sighed heavily. "I think maybe there's a limit to how involved I can be in your life."

"So… what?" he said, opening the door and getting out. "Lunch is fine, but no violations of the Patriot Act?"

"Pretty much," she said. "I'll call you soon, John. Please try to stay safe, all right?"

She'd driven off before he could reply, though.

And, apparently, while he'd been gone she'd somehow gotten conned into providing Langly with baked goods.

"Peanut butter," Langly said, and Byers realized he was staring.

"What?"

"The cookies. They were peanut butter." He returned his gaze to the computer screen in front of him. "Oh, hey! Frohike, come take a look at this. I told you I was right."

"Right about what?"

"Somebody hacked into the Maryland DMV yesterday, and guess whose VIN number and driving record they pulled?"

"The Baltimore Ravens," Frohike snapped, leaning over Langly's shoulder. "How the hell should I know?"

"Meg Halliday," Langly said, turning the monitor around so Byers could see as well. "I told you there was a reason she showed up here earlier. Something spooked her."

"Yeah," Frohike said. "Something or _someone_."

"What are you two talking about?" Byers asked.

"Your ex paid us a courtesy call before she went to get you. We figured it wasn't our sparkling personalities alone that attracted her." He turned to Frohike again. "I told you that Yves turning back up would mean trouble."

"If it _was_ Yves," Frohike said. "We're just speculating."

"The hack had her fingerprints all over it. She's at the bottom of this, man. I'm not sure how or why, but she is. What did the feds say, Byers? Did they ask you if you'd seen her?"

"Yves is back?" Jimmy said, looking up suddenly.

"No," Byers said, a little too sharply.

Jimmy flinched.

"What I mean," Byers amended, "is that we don't know for sure whether she's back. Some people seem to think she is."

"Because the evidence is pointing pretty obviously in that direction," Langly said. "Unless you know someone else who routinely hacks into the FBI's counterterrorism database."

"Sure. Lots of people."

Langly made a face. "I mean _successfully_. And who walks away afterward without leaving a trace behind."

"Wait," Jimmy said, "what are you guys saying-?"

"We don't know anything yet, Jimmy," Frohike began, while Langly started running through all the indications they'd had that Yves was currently somewhere in the D.C. metro area.

Byers, for his part, decided to take advantage of the distraction to slip away.

But before he could make his escape, Frohike grabbed him by the elbow and manhandled him into a quiet corner of the office.

"Not so fast. You know something about this, don't you, buddy?"

"What makes you say that?"

"You've been all squirrelly lately." Frohike paused. "Plus, your ex is a good liar… probably an essential skill for a lawyer… but she's not good enough to fool me. Something's up. So spill."

Byers sighed. He was really too tired to keep fighting this, and, besides, he'd already been through one interrogation on Yves' behalf. He really didn't feel like he owed her another.

"All right. Fine. Yves is back in D.C., and, yes, the FBI is looking for her. But if you're asking me if I know why they want her, the answer is no."

"And you didn't share this with the rest of us _why_?"

He shrugged. "I needed some information from her. One of the conditions was that I not tell anyone I'd seen her."

"Damn it, Byers-"

"I made a judgment call. Maybe it was a bad one, but I made it and it's done."

Frohike considered for a long moment, then said, "Should we tell Jimmy?"

"I promised I wouldn't. Yves was… especially vehement on that point."

"Well, she would be, wouldn't she?"

Byers frowned. "What makes you say that? Not that I disagree, but…"

"Something happened down in Miami. It doesn't take a genius."

No, it really didn't.

"By the way," Fohike said, finally letting go of Byers' sleeve, "I like the wife. So does Langly. You should have brought her around more, back before… you know."

Byers edged toward the door to his room. "You think that spending quality time with you two would have saved my marriage?"

Frohike made a noncommittal face. "It's not like it could have made things too much worse. Could it?"

Byers just closed the door without answering.

He sat down on the bed, the second-hand mattress sagging under his weight. While he'd been in interrogation, his cell phone had gone dead, its LCD face blank and silver. He plugged the phone into the wall and waited while it charged to life again.

They lived mostly off the grid, thanks in large part to Langly's hacking skills, but the cell phone had been one modern convenience Byers refused to give up. It was actually in his name with a listed number, despite the other's protests.

The phone chirped a voice mail alert. He had four new messages, though two of those were from Langly from the previous morning. There was a message from his dad, something of a rarity, and he made a note to call him back the next day.

Reg Moncrieff had left a message as well. "I have something I think you might like to take a look at. Give me a call back when you get this. It might not be anything important, but it seemed... Well, just give me a call."

Byers hit reply and waited while the phone rang. An unfamiliar voice answered.

"Dr. Moncrieff?"

"No. This is Detective Mortenson of the Prince William County Police. Who is this?"

"I'm- My name is John Byers. I'm an associate of Reg Moncrieff's. Is, uh, everything all right?"

"I'm afraid not, Mr. Byers. Does Dr. Moncrieff have any family in the area?"

"Not that I know of. I believe his ex-wife lives in Boston."

"We're going to need someone to come down to the station..."

"I can call his research assistant. I know they're close. From what I've seen, she's probably the closest thing he has to family." He paused. "I take it the situation is bad?"

The detective sighed heavily. "Yeah, it's bad. I'm sorry."

Not half as sorry as Byers was.

* * *

Kate the grad student was already there when they arrived, white-faced and holding onto a styrofoam cup of police station coffee so tightly her knuckles blanched. Frohike spotted her from across the waiting area as they entered and nudged the other two in her direction. Byers' call must have gotten her out of bed because her hair was pulled messily back and she had puffy circles under her eyes. She was wearing faded blue jeans and an oversize sweatshirt that read "Our Drinking Team Has A Football Problem."

Frohike took a seat across from her; so did Langly. But Byers went over and put a hand on her shoulder. She shook it off.

"Don't be nice to me yet," she said, putting her coffee cup down. "I'll just wind up crying, or something equally embarrassing. Thank you for coming, though. I'm not sure I could deal with this by myself, and he didn't-" She stopped and sucked in a breath. "He didn't really have anyone else."

"I'm so sorry," Byers said, sitting down beside her. "I hope we can help."

She turned to look at him, profiled in the precinct's fluorescent light, and Frohike had that sense of deja vu again, strong as it had been days earlier in Moncrieff's office.

"You've already helped," she said. "Thank you."

"We want to do whatever we can," Byers continued. "Not just to find out who did this, but to ensure your safety as well."

"You think he was killed for a reason," Kate said, her voice flat, as though she was stating a known fact. Just a few days earlier she'd been arguing with them in Moncrieff's office, insisting that the government wasn't capable of pulling off any sort of complex conspiracy. "A reason beyond just a simple robbery."

"It's too soon to be sure of anything." Byers paused. "But the timing is suspicious."

Frohike half-expected her to protest, but instead she just watched Byers with that somehow, somewhere familiar look of concentration on her face.

"This happen to you guys a lot?"

"Not a lot. But there is definitely precedent."

Precedent? Oh, yeah. Off the top of his head, Frohike could list at least ten dead bodies that the three of them shared some measure of responsibility for. Not all of them had _stayed_ dead, but that was an entirely different story.

"Well," she said with something like grim humor, "_now_ you tell us."

Funny how a little spilled blood tended to make people into true believers.

The cops said it looked like Moncrieff had come home and interrupted a burglary in-progress -- as if that wasn't the oldest BS story in the world. He'd taken two to the chest, sloppy and badly-aimed. Or, at least, someone had wanted to leave the impression that he'd been shot in a panic, by someone who didn't know much about how to handle a gun. Frohike wasn't buying it, though.

"Katherine Grey?" someone called.

"That's me."

"I'm Detective Mortenson."

"Detective," Byers said, standing up and extending a hand in greeting. "I'm John Byers. We spoke on the phone."

"Oh, yeah. Right. I'm sorry for your loss, Mr. Byers, Ms. Grey. I'm afraid we're going to have to ask you some questions. I understand that this is difficult..."

"No," Kate said. "Ask anything. I understand you have to do your job."

"He have any family?"

"No, there wasn't anyone," she said.

One look at Byers' face showed that the words hit a little too close to home. After all, it could just as easily have been any of them.

"In that case, there's the question of making a positive I.D.-"

Frohike wouldn't have thought Kate could get much paler, but she did.

"Come on," Langly said. "Cut her some slack."

"Sorry," the cop said, not looking particularly sorry. "It would be better to do this now."

"I'll go," Byers said, "if that's all right."

The cop nodded and Byers followed him. Kate sat back down and wouldn't look at either of them for a couple minutes.

She really reminded Frohike of someone: her mannerisms, her body language, the inflection in her voice when she'd thanked them for being willing to come down there. He'd only vaguely noticed it before, but now the similarity was remarkable. There was something tantalizingly familiar about her slight hardness, about the resignation in her manner. He just couldn't quite place where he'd seen it before.

Byers came back after about ten minutes, looking a little shaken, but he actually covered it fairly well. For Byers, anyway.

"I don't suppose," Kate said, that edge still in her voice, "that there's any chance this is all a horrible mistake?"

"No, there isn't."

She blinked a couple times, then said, "Okay. Now you can be nice to me."

Byers sat down beside her, putting a hand on the back of her chair.

"Shouldn't someone call his ex-wife and let her know what happened?" Frohike suggested.

"Gina?" Kate said, in the same tone of voice that most people used for the word 'terrorists'. "I doubt she'd care. My general -- and admittedly biased -- impression is that she's a hellish psycho bitch who only cares about herself. She left him for one of the assistant professors he worked with at Cornell -- and when she left, she actually told him she didn't care whether he lived or died. So I'm guessing that probably still holds true. Let the cops call her. Hopefully, it will sting a little -- but I doubt it."

"Meow," Langly said, and Kate shot him a dark look. "What? Too soon?"

"_Way_ to soon, you jackass," Frohike said, grabbing him by the jacket and pulling him over to the coffeemaker.

Byers aimed a displeased frown in their direction and sat back down with Kate.

"Nice, Langly. Real nice."

"Emotions and stuff make me uncomfortable," he said, not looking contrite in the slightest. "You know that about me. If you want appropriate emotional responses bring Jimmy next time instead."

"I'll keep that in mind."

Langly poured himself a cup of coffee, and Byers motioned at Frohike, jogging halfway across the waiting area so they would meet in the middle.

"I'm going to drive back with Kate." He looked exceptionally serious, even for Byers. "I don't think she should be alone."

Frohike just barely managed not to roll his eyes. That was Byers: solicitous to a fault, even when he didn't need to be.

"All right. We'll meet you at home." Frohike paused. "Just don't get talked into being a hero, okay?"

"I just want to make sure she's all right."

"She strikes me as a fairly tough cookie."

Byers frowned. "She needs our help."

"Oh, boy." Frohike gave in and rolled his eyes.

"She could be in danger," Byers pointed out reasonably. "I told her to make plans to stay with a friend for a few days until we get this all sorted out. I want to make sure she gets there safely."

"Uh-huh." And the fact that she was a doe-eyed, helpless female presumably had _nothing_ to do with it. Byers was so easy. He did have a point, though.

Langly tossed his non-biodegradable cup of coffee into the trash and walked over.

"We outta here yet?"

"Byers is playing Sir Galahad, so it's just you and me for the ride home."

Langly shrugged. "Okay. I'll be right back. I've gotta pee."

"Well, get a move on."

Byers went over and fetched Kate from where she was slumped in one of the station's plastic chairs. To be fair, Frohike reflected, she did look pretty broken up. Byers offered to take her keys, but she shook her head and they walked out toward the parking lot. Frohike watched them go, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed.

They stopped, profiled just outside the wide double doors, speaking seriously to each other. Kate reached out a hand, leaned in close, said something that only Byers could hear. Her face softened when she looked at him, and for a moment Frohike felt like he was standing on a thirteen-years-earlier Baltimore street corner watching almost the exact same scene play out.

_Oh, crap_. But at least it solved the mystery of who she looked like. He couldn't believe he hadn't seen it sooner.

It might also, he realized with a sinking feeling, be another reason Byers had seemed so reluctant to drop this story. Another goddamned damsel in just enough distress to get them all killed. Or worse. The timing of all this, especially this business with Yves, especially with the subject of New Mexico coming up again, just seemed way too convenient. Events were coming together in exactly the sort of way that made his survival instincts tingle, and he wouldn't put it past Them to have staged this kind of distraction. Byers' weak spot where Susanne was concerned was well-known and a mile wide, even after all this time.

Frohike was going to have to find out exactly where little Katie had been when Moncrieff was shot -- and he was going to have to do it without tipping his hand to Byers. At worst, she was in it up to her admittedly fetching eyebrows. But even the best case scenario -- that the kid just happened to bear a passing resemblance to Susanne and they were the three unluckiest guys in the world -- was still asking for an incredible amount of trouble.

Oh, yeah. No way this ended well, for anybody.

"What's up?" Langly said, coming up behind him.

"We've got a problem," Frohike said, watching Byers climb into the passenger's seat of Kate's car. "I don't trust the kid."

"You think she was involved in the shooting?"

"I think," he said as the car pulled away, "that we'd better find out."

(Continued in Part 4.)


End file.
